(Sun Microsystems, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, www.sun.com) A major manufacturer of Unix-based workstations and servers. In 1981, Bavarian-born Andreas Bechtolsheim was licensing rights to a computer he designed. Named Sun for Stanford University Network and using off-the-shelf parts, it was an affordable workstation for engineers and scientists. In that year, he met Vinod Khosla, a native of India, who convinced him to form a company and expand. Khosla, Bechtolsheim and Scott McNealy, all Stanford MBAs, founded Sun in 1982.

Its first computers, the Sun-1 and subsequent Sun-2 were instant successes in the university market. Sun began to compete against its rival Apollo Computer, an east-coast workstation company, eventually surpassing it in sales (Apollo was later purchased by HP).

Sun has been a major force in open systems. Its computers have always run under Unix, which was licensed from AT&T and then later purchased outright. Sun and AT&T had formed such a tight alliance for a while that a host of Unix vendors formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF) in 1988 to keep Sun from dominating Unix.

In 1984, Bill Joy, head of R&D, designed NFS, which was broadly licensed and became the industry standard for file sharing. Sun later packaged its Unix components into a complete environment named Solaris, which it later ported to other platforms, including the Intel x86.

Sun used the Motorola 68K CPUs in its products until it designed its own RISC-based SPARC chips, which it launched with the SPARCstation 1 in 1989. Having gone through many iterations, SPARC CPUs are also made by Fujitsu and other third parties via licensing arrangements (see SPARC).

In the mid-1990s, Sun introduced the Java programming language and ushered in a new era for application development on the Internet (see Java and J2EE). Later on, Sun was a major proponent of network computers. See network computer and Sun-Netscape Alliance.