Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems (Sun Microsystems, Inc.) is a computer, semiconductor and software manufacturer headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.

Sun's products include computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC and AMD's Opteron processors, the Solaris and Linux operating systems, the NFS network file system, and the Java platform. From June 2005, Sun also produces laptops called Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation [1]. The pioneering OpenLook (Sun's own graphical user interface) was very stable but would now be considered minimalistic. A wide choice of windowing systems are now offered, including Open source contributions.

Sun Microsystems is headquartered on the west campus of Agnews Developmental Area in Santa Clara, California, which was formerly an asylum. The east branch is also owned by the company and is located in San Jose.

Brief history
The initial design for Sun's UNIX workstation was conceived when the founders were graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The company name SUN originally stood for Stanford University Network (which is reflected in the company's stock symbol, SUNW, which now stands for Sun Worldwide). The company was incorporated in 1982 and went public in 1986. Its founders were Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy (a primary developer of BSD Unix), and Andy Bechtolsheim; McNealy and Bechtolsheim remain at Sun. Other Sun luminaries include early employees John Gilmore and James Gosling. Sun was an early advocate of Unix-based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially NFS, as reflected in the company's motto "The Network Is The Computer". James Gosling led the team which developed the Java programming language. Most recently, Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at W3C.

Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner.

Hardware
Sun originally used the Motorola 68000 CPU family for the Sun 1 through Sun 3 computer series. Starting with the Sun 4 line (SPARCstation 1 onwards), the company used its own processor family, SPARC, which employs an IEEE standard RISC architecture. Sun has implemented multiple high-end generations of the Sparc architecture, including Sparc-1, SuperSparc, UltraSparc-I, UltraSparc-II, UltraSparc-III, and currently UltraSparc IV. Sun has developed several generations of workstations and servers, including SPARC Station series, Sun Ultra Series and the Sun Fire series. Sun also has a second line of lower cost processors meant for low-end systems which included the MicroSparc-I, MicroSparc-II, UltraSparc-IIe, UltraSparc-IIi, and UltraSparc-IIIi. Sun has had a difficult time keeping up with its competitors' processors' clock speed and computing power, but its customer base has been fairly loyal due to the popularity, and legendary stability, of its SunOS (and later Solaris) versions of Unix.

The console of a Sun workstation running the X Window SystemFor the first decade of Sun's history, the company was predominately a vendor of technical workstations, competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s.

For a short period in the late 1980s, they sold an Intel 80386–based machine, the Sun 386i. An x86 port of Solaris has been available since then. Currently, Sun is again selling x86 hardware and has introduced a version of Solaris for AMD64.

In the mid-1990s, Sun acquired Diba and Cobalt Networks with the aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also marketed a network computer (diskless workstation, as popularized by Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison). None of these business initiatives were particularly successful.

In the late-1990s, as Sun's workstations were lagging in performance when compared to that of their competitors and especially to Wintel Personal Computers, the company successfully transformed itself to a vendor of large-scale Symmetric multiprocessing servers. This transition was enabled by technology that was acquired from Silicon Graphics and Cray Research. The Cray CS-6400 server line was transformed into the very successful Sun Enterprise 10000 mainframes. Driven by the increased prominence of web-serving database-searching applications, blade servers (high density rack-mounted systems) were also emphasized.

The Bubble and Sun's subsequent survival
During the dot-com bubble, Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by venture capital-funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The share price in particular increased to a level that even the company's executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business growth, Sun expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, infrastructure, and office space.

The bursting of the bubble in 2001 was the start of a period of poor business performance for Sun, as the growth of online business failed to meet predictions sales dropped. As online businesses closed and assests auctioned off a large amount of high-end Sun hardware was availible very cheaply. Much like Apple, Sun relied a great deal on hardware sales.

Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have led to repeated rounds of layoffs, executive departures, and expense-reduction efforts. In 2002 the share price returned to the 1998 pre-bubble level, a pattern of escalation and decline comparable to other companies in the sector, and has hovered in the single digits since then. In mid-2004, Sun ceased manufacturing operations at their Newark, California facility and consolidated all of the company's US-based manufacturing operations to their Hillsboro, Oregon facility, as part of continued cost-reduction efforts.

Many companies (like E*Trade and Google) chose to build Web applications based on large numbers of the less expensive PC-class Intel-architecture servers running Linux, rather than a smaller number of high-end Sun servers. They reported benefits including substantially lower expenses (both acquisition and maintenance) and greater flexibility based on the use of open-source software.

It is notable that very high use services like eBay use Sun products for reliability reasons. Also, higher level telecom control systems such as NMAS and OSS service predominantly use Sun equipment. This use is due mainly to the company basing its products around a mature version of the Unix operating system and the support service that Sun provides.

Present focus
In 2004, in common with the trend of specialisation in the electronics industry, Sun cancelled two major processor projects which were emphasizing high instruction level parallelism and high operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processor projects emphasizing multi-threading and multiprocessing, such as the Niagara Processor. The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use the Japanese company's processor chips in some future Sun computers. Finally, it has a strategic alliance with AMD to produce market-leading x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor. To this end, it acquired Kaelia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers.

In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid, a grid computing deployment on which it offers utility computing services priced at $1 (US) per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering builds upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, of which Sun claims to be able to achieve 97% utilization.

Sun's software initiatives are increasingly making use of Open Source, most notably including Solaris via the OpenSolaris community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. The announced business model is the sale of support services on a variety of bases including per-employee and per-socket.

Sun chooses not to carry some forms of insurance (such as earthquake insurance). Since most of Suns assets are intellectual property and reputation, this is a prudent financial stategy.

In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 mln on GAAP basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14, 2005.

On June 2, 2005, Sun announced it would purchase Storage Technology Corporation ("Storagetek") for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share. If approved, the merger would create a company with approximately 39,000 employees.

On June 26, 2005, Sun announced it would produce laptops. The laptop, called Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation, is based on Sun's Ultrasparc processor and running Solaris operating system. [2]

Software

Operating systems
All Sun systems have been based on UNIX systems which are well known for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.

Solaris 8 with the Common Desktop EnvironmentThe Sun 1 was shipped with Unisoft V7 UNIX. Later in 1982 Sun provided a customized 4.1BSD UNIX called SunOS as an operating system for its workstations. In 1992, along with AT&T, it integrated BSD UNIX and System V into Solaris, which as a result is based on UNIX SVR4.

Sun offered a secure variant of Solaris called Trusted Solaris for releases before the current Solaris 10, which includes the same capabilities as part of the basic offering.

Sun is also known for community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies. Though a late adopter, it has included Linux as part of its strategy, following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to Linux-based systems. Blastwave compiles and packages open source software for Solaris machines, and has automated software consistency tracking, upgrading and completeing dependancies as part of the upload process. Recently, Sun has offered Linux-based desktop software called Java Desktop System (originally code-named "Madhatter") for use both on x86 hardware and on Sun's Sun Ray thin-client systems. It has also announced plans to supply its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It has already released its newest OS, Solaris 10, under the open-source Common Development and Distribution License.

Java platform
The Java programming language took the best features from the then industry standard language C++ and removed nearly all of its bad or rather more difficult and dangerous features, such as pointers. Backed with a massive class library Java programs can call upon a large set of GUI, mathematical and Internet access code that is tried and proven.

The Java platform, developed in the early 1990s was specifically developed with the objective of allowing programs to function regardless of the device they were used on, sparking the slogan "Write once, run everywhere". While this objective has not been entirely achieved (prompting the riposte "Write once, debug everywhere"), Java is regarded as being largely hardware- and operating system-independent.

Java was initially promoted as a platform for client-side applets running inside the web browser. This positioning was never very successful and while browser-based applications have had considerable success in displacing compiled applications on the desktop, Java has never been an important part of the web-browser experience.

The platform consists of three major parts, the Java programming language, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and several Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The design of the Java platform is controlled by the vendor and user community through the Java Community Process (JCP).

The Java programming language is an object-oriented programming language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it has become one of the world's most popular programming languages.

In order to allow programs written in the Java language to be run on (virtually) any device, Java programs are compiled to byte code, which can be executed by any JVM, regardless of the environment.

The Java APIs provide an extensive set of library routines. The Standard Edition (J2SE) of the API provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality, while the Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is aimed at large software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers. The Micro Edition (J2ME) is used to build software for devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices.

Office suite
Sun acquired the German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice, which it released as the office suite OpenOffice.org under both GNU LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License). OpenOffice.org is designed to be compatible with Microsoft Office, is available on many platforms and widely used in the open source community.

The current StarOffice product is a closed-source product based on OpenOffice.org. The principal differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are that Sun supports it and it comes nicely packaged with extensive documentation, a wider range of fonts and templates and what Sun claims to be an improved dictionary and thesaurus. Whilst new releases of OpenOffice.org are relatively frequent, StarOffice follows a more conservative release schedule supposedly more suited to enterprise deployments.

Notable persons
James Gosling, co-inventor of Java language
Patrick Naughton, Java language project initiator
Mike Sheridan, co-inventor of Java language
Robert Drost, of 2004 Technology Review "Top 100 Top Young Innovators"

Founders
Andy Bechtolsheim
Bill Joy
Vinod Khosla
Scott McNealy

Sun Microsystems ( Sun Microsystems, Inc.) is a computer,
semiconductor number sun and software manufacturer headquartered in
Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon and sun Linlithgow, Scotland.

Sun's microsystems products include computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC and AMD's Opteron processors, the Solaris and co. Linux operating systems, the NFS network file system, and the
Java platform. From June 2005, Sun also produces laptops called Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation [1]. The pioneering sun OpenLook (Sun's own graphical user interface) chipset was very stable but would now be considered minimalistic. A wide choice of windowing systems enterprise are now offered, including Open source contributions.

Sun Microsystems is headquartered head on the west campus microsystems of Agnews
Developmental Area in Santa Clara, California, which was formerly sun an asylum.
The east branch is also owned by the investment company sun and gear is located in San Jose.

java sun microsystems

Brief of history
The initial design for Sun's
UNIX workstation was conceived when the founders were graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, v. California. The company name SUN originally stood for Stanford University Network (which is reflected in the company's stock symbol, SUNW, which now stands for Sun Worldwide). The company was incorporated sun in 1982 and fortuna went public in sun 1986. Its founders were Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill microsystems Joy (a primary developer of BSD Unix), and sun Andy Bechtolsheim; sale McNealy and Bechtolsheim remain at Sun.
Other Sun luminaries include early employees John Gilmore and James Gosling. andy Sun was an early announcement advocate of Unix-was based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially NFS, as reflected in the company's motto "The Network Is The Computer". case James Gosling led the team which developed the Java programming language. Most vs. recently, Jon Bosak staff sun led the percentage creation of the XML specification microsystems at W3C.

Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of atcom the
word sun, was designed by sun
microsystems professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo had the case sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to sun stand on one corner.

Hardware
Sun
originally used the Motorola 68000 CPU family for the Sun 1 through Sun interface, 3 computer series. Starting with logo the Sun 4 line (SPARCstation 1 onwards), the company used its own processor family, SPARC, which employs an IEEE standard RISC architecture. Sun has implemented multiple high-end microsystems
generations of the Sparc architecture, including Sparc- 1, SuperSparc, UltraSparc-sun
unix I, UltraSparc-II, UltraSparc-III, java
and currently UltraSparc microsystems IV. Sun has developed several at david generations of workstations and servers, including SPARC Station series, Sun Ultra Series zander and the Sun Fire series. Sun also has a sun second line of lower cost processors meant for low-end systems which included the MicroSparc-I, MicroSparc- II, UltraSparc- IIe, UltraSparc-IIi, and UltraSparc-IIIi. Sun has had a difficult time keeping up with its competitors' microsystems sun processors' clock speed and computing power, but its customer base has been fairly loyal sun layoff due to the popularity, and legendary stability, of its microsystems SunOS (and later Solaris) versions of Unix.

The
console of staff a Sun workstation running the X Window SystemFor the first decade of story Sun's history, the company was predominately a vendor of technical workstations, competing microsystems toy successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of layoffs in the 1980s.

For a short period in the late 1980s,
microsystems they sold an Intel 80386–based machine, the Sun 386i. An x86 port of Solaris has been available since then. Currently, Sun is again selling x86 hardware and has introduced case a microsoft version microsystems of Solaris for AMD64.

In the mid-1990s, Sun acquired Diba and Cobalt Networks
with the aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also sun marketed a network computer (diskless workstation, as popularized of by chappell Oracle Corporation CEO Larry middle Ellison). None of these business initiatives were particularly successful.

In the late-1990s, as kodak Sun's workstations were benchmarks lagging for in performance when compared to chinese that of their swot competitors and chappell especially to Wintel Personal Computers, the company successfully transformed microsystems itself to a vendor of large-scale Symmetric multiprocessing servers. This transition was enabled by microsystems
technology that was acquired from Silicon Graphics sun and Cray Research. The Cray CS-6400 atcom combat model sun microsystems server line was transformed sun into the sun very successful Sun Enterprise 10000 mainframes. Driven by the microsystems increased prominence of web-serving database-searching applications, blade servers (in high density rack-mounted systems) were also emphasized.

The Bubble find and Sun's subsequent microsystems survival
During the dot-com bubble, Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue,
profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this microsystems was due + to genuine expansion of demand
for web-serving microsoft cycles, corporate but another part was synthetic, fueled by
venture capital-funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server servers presences in the expectation of sun high traffic levels that history never materialized. The share price in particular increased to a week level that
even the company's executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business marketing growth, microsystems Sun microsystems microsystems expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, microsystems infrastructure, and office space.

The bursting of the layoffs bubble assessment in 2001 was microsystems the start of a period of poor business performance for Sun, microsystems as the growth of online business eastman failed
to meet predictions sales dropped. As
online businesses closed and assests microsystems auctioned
microsystems microsystems sun microsystems off a large amount of high-end Sun hardware was availible very cheaply. Much like Apple, microsystems Sun relied microsystems a great deal on microsystems hardware sales.

Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have led to repeated rounds of layoffs, executive departures, and expense-reduction efforts. In 2002 sun the share price returned to the 1998 pre-bubble level, a pattern charlie of escalation and decline comparable to
other companies in the sector, and sun has hovered in the david single digits since then. In mid-live 2004, Sun ceased manufacturing operations at their Newark,
California facility site and consolidated all of the company's US-based manufacturing operations
to their sun mounting Hillsboro, Oregon facility, microsystems as part of continued cost-reduction efforts.

Many companies (like E*Trade and Google) chose microsystems to build Web applications based on large numbers of microsystems the microsystems less expensive PC-class michigan Intel- microsystems architecture servers running Linux, rather than a smaller number of high-end Sun servers. They reported benefits including microsystems substantially lower expenses (both acquisition sun and maintenance) and greater flexibility based on the use of open-source software.

It is notable that for very business high use services like eBay use Sun products inc for reliability reasons. Also, higher level telecom control systems such as NMAS and OSS service predominantly use Sun equipment. This use is due mainly to the company basing its products around a mature version sun of the Unix operating system and the support service that Sun microsystems provides.

Present focus
In 2004, in common sale with the sun trend of sun specialisation in the electronics microsystems industry, Sun cancelled two major processor projects which were emphasizing high instruction level parallelism and high operating sun frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate
on processor projects emphasizing multi-threading and multiprocessing, such as the Niagara Processor. The company also announced a steve collaboration with Fujitsu sun to use the Japanese company's processor chips in some future Sun microsystems computers. Finally, it has sun a strategic alliance with AMD to produce market-leading x86/x64 servers based on AMD's sun Opteron processor. To this end, it acquired Kaelia, a startup wolf founded by original
Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high- performance AMD- based servers.

In February 2005, Sun east
announced the r&d Sun Grid, a
grid computing deployment on which it offers utility computing services priced at $1 (US) per CPU/hour for sun processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering builds upon 2005 an existing 3,peter 000-problem CPU server farm used ports, for internal R&D for
veverka over 10 years, of which Sun claims to
be able to achieve 97% utilization.

Sun's software initiatives
are increasingly making use of the Open Source, most notably including Solaris via the OpenSolaris community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. The announced business
model is the sale what of support services
on a variety of bases including sun per-employee and per-socket.

Sun error sun chooses not to carry some forms china of insurance ( such as sun earthquake insurance). for founded
Since most of Suns assets are microsystems intellectual property business and reputation, this is sun a prudent financial stategy.

In January sun 2005, of Sun reported a net profit architecture of $19 million founded for fiscal 2005 web second quarter, for the sun first time in three microsystems years. This sun was followed by net loss of $9 mln on oracle GAAP basis for the third quarter microsystems 2005, as reported on what April 14, 2005.

On June 2,
2005, Sun announced it would purchase Storage Technology Corporation ("Storagetek") for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share. If approved, the merger would create a company with approximately 39,000
employees.

On June 26, 2005, Sun announced in entry-level it would microsystems produce laptops. The buisness laptop, number called Ultra 3 Mobile troubleshooting Workstation, is
based microsystems sun on Sun's Ultrasparc processor and running Solaris operating system. [2]

Software

Operating systems
All Sun systems have been based on UNIX systems which are well known for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.

Solaris 8 with the Common Desktop EnvironmentThe Sun
1 was shipped with sun sun Unisoft V7 UNIX. staff Later in 1982 Sun provided laura a customized
4.layoffs 1BSD UNIX called SunOS as transcripts microsystems an operating system for its
sun workstations. In 1992, along founded with AT&T, it integrated BSD UNIX and and System V into Solaris,
which as a result is based on UNIX SVR4.

Sun offered a secure variant 2003 of Solaris hardware sparc called Trusted richard Solaris for releases before corp. the current Solaris 10, which
includes the same capabilities as part of the basic offering.

Sun is also known for community-based and open-source licensing sun of its major technologies. Though a late adopter, it has sun included market Linux as ed part of its strategy, following several years of difficult competition and loss sun of server market computer share to Linux-microsystems based systems. Blastwave compiles configuration and packages open source software
for Solaris machines, and was has automated software consistency tracking, sun upgrading neff and completeing dependancies
as part of the sun upload process. sun sun Recently, Sun has offered Linux-based desktop software called Java Desktop System (originally code-named "Madhatter") burrows for use both on x86 hardware and on Sun's Sun Ray thin-sun client systems. It has also announced plans to supply its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on oem Linux. It has already released its newest OS, Solaris 10, under the open-source Common Development and Distribution License.

Java platform
sun The Java programming language took the address best features from the then microsystems industry standard language used
C++ and removed nearly all of study of its bad or rather graham-hackett more difficult and dangerous features, such as pointers. Backed with a risk massive class library Java
programs can call upon a large set of GUI, mathematical and Internet access code that is tried and microsystems of proven.

culture The Java platform, developed in address the early 1990s was specifically developed with the objective microsystems of
allowing programs to function regardless of the device they were used on, sparking the slogan "Write once, run everywhere". While this objective has sun not been entirely achieved (prompting the
riposte "Write once, debug everywhere"), Java is regarded as being largely hardware- and operating system-e-business independent.

Java was initially promoted as a platform for client-side applets running inside microsystems the web 8 browser. This positioning was never
very successful and while browser-based sun applications have had considerable
success in microsystems displacing compiled year applications on the
desktop, Java has never been an important part
of the web-for browser year experience.

michigan The platform week consists of three major parts, the Java programming language, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and microsystems several sun Java Application Programming
Interfaces (
APIs). The
design of the Java platform microsystems is sun controlled by the vendor function sun and user community through the Java Community Process (JCP).

The Java programming language is download an object-malaysia oriented programming language. Since its introduction in microsystems late 1995, it has become one of the world's most popular programming languages.

In order to allow programs written in the Java language to be microsystems run
on (virtually) any logo device, Java programs are compiled
to byte code, which can microsystems chu be executed by any java JVM, regardless of the environment.

sun The Java APIs provide an extensive set of library routines. The Standard Edition (J2SE) sun of the stock API provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality, while the Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is aimed at large microsystems software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers. The Micro Edition (J2ME) is used to build microsystems software for
devices with limited revenues microsystems resources, such as mobile devices.

Office suite
resources Sun acquired the outsourcing German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice, which it released as the office
suite OpenOffice.org under both GNU LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License). OpenOffice.microsystems org is designed to number be compatible sun with Microsoft Office, is available microsystems on many sun platforms and widely used in the open source community.

The current microsystems microsystems StarOffice product is a closed-source product based on of OpenOffice.org. The principal
differences
microsystems between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are that layoffs Sun supports it and it comes nicely packaged with student extensive documentation, a wider range of fonts and templates and what Sun claims to be an improved dictionary and thesaurus. Whilst new releases of OpenOffice.storagetek org are relatively frequent, StarOffice follows a more 250 conservative release schedule supposedly more suited to enterprise deployments.

Notable persons
James Gosling, co- inventor of Java language
history Patrick Naughton, Java language project initiator
sun Mike Sheridan, co-inventor of Java sun language
Robert Drost, of 2004 Technology - Review "Top 100 Top sun Young sun Innovators"

Founders
Andy Bechtolsheim
Bill Joy
microsystems Vinod Khosla
Scott uk McNealy

Information provided by Wikipedia.