THE AGE OF SUN MICROSYSTEMS:

INTRODUCTION:

Among the most renowned companies in the world that dealt with the sales of computers, creation of languages and provision of information technology services, Sun Microsystems can be said as one of the best. It had ruled for about three decades since its inception in the year 1982 and was considered to be as one of the finest competitors among its rivals in this period of time.

The most amazing creation of this corporation is Java which is now the foundation and utility for the creation of most advanced software applications and widely used computer programming language. Sun Microsystems is also credited with many inventions and creations. Let us see what they are in brief.

FOUNDATION:

Sun Microsystems was founded by three graduate students at Stanford University VinodKhosla, Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott McNealy on February 24, 1982. Soon after it was founded, they were joined by Bill Joy who was a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution. The name SUN was taken from the first letters of the three words Stanford University Network.

ROOTS FOR SUN:

Andy Bechtolsheim would gain the credit for planting the roots for SUN microsystems as he created the first UNIX work station; the Sun-1 was their first UNIX station. He created this while was pursuing his graduation at Stanford University. The design is built based on the Motorola 68000 processor with advanced memory management to support the UNIX operating system. He was then joined by his colleagues VinodKhosla and Scott McNealy and established the organization.

SUN’S HARDWARE AND SYSTEMS:

Sun started designing the systems based on the Motorola family of central processing units and later their systems were evolved based on the SPARC systems and x86 based systems. Let us see their evolution in brief:

MOTOROLA:

•Their first UNIX system, SUN-1 was designed with Motorola 68000 family central processing unit. Their later UNIX creations SUN-2 and SUN-3 were also built on Motorola processors with Sun-2 using 68010 processors and Sun-3 using 68020 processors. The Sun-3x variant was built with Motorola 68030 processor.

SPARC:

• SPARC is a RISC processor which is designed by the company itself. It is initially a 32-bit architecture system and they had used this until their introduction of the SPARC V9 architecture which added 64-bit extensions.

•Their wide array of SPARC-based computer systems which were developed in the later years include SPARC station, Ultra and Sun Blade series of workstations, the SPARC server, Netra, Enterprise and Sun Fire line of servers.

X86 BASED SYSTEMS:

•Sun Microsystems first began using the x86 based systems in the late 1980s. But with the introduction of the SPARC systems and the termination of the Motorola based systems, they stopped using these systems.

•It was in the year 2002 Sun Microsystems again announced that it was introducing their first x86 general purpose system. They later allied with AMD to produce x86/x64 based AMD’s Opteron Processor. The following years saw a great advancement in x86 processor based systems through SUN microsystems.

IN THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY:

Sun Microsystems had been a source for a number of software applications that have now become an essential part in every domestic system usage and business usage of computers. The basic categories in software industry that were conceived by the Sun Microsystems were operating systems, Java platform, office suite, virtualization and datacenter automation software, and database management systems.

•The well-known operating system Solaris was the creation of the Sun Microsystems which was introduced into the market in the year 1993. Until then, the Sun Microsystems had used the SunOS for their systems. After the Oracle Corporation’s acquisition of the Sun Microsystems in the January, 2010, its name was changed to Oracle Solaris. These systems are mostly known for their scalability with the SPARC systems.

• Java platform which was famously known for the slogan “Write once, debug everywhere” was developed at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. It is regarded as hardware and operating system-independent.  This platform basically contains three major parts, the Java programming language, the Java Virtual Machine and several Java Application Programming Interfaces. This is an object-oriented language and has been the development platform for various applications of music, video and others.

•When Sun acquired the German software company StarDivision, it also had acquired their office suite StarOffice which Sun releases as OpenOffice.org and this has supported many platforms like Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris.

•Sun had announced the virtualization and datacenter automation product suite for commodity and hardware in the year 2007. It had also provided many virtual desktop solutions and products to the clients in the later years. They had acquired MySQL AB, the developer of the MySQL database in the year 2008 for 1 billion US dollars.

•Apart from these software development branches, Sun Microsystems also had sales in the storage systems to complement their system offerings. They also had marketed for the High Performance Computing solutions through Sun Constellation System.

ACQUISITION BY ORACLE:

Sun Microsystems was officially announced as sold to the Oracle Corporation in the year 2009. Sun started laying-off many employees in the days followed by and late completely transferred the required and discussed assets to the Oracle Corporation. Sun India became a legal part of the Oracle in the September 1, 2011.

EVER REMEMBERED CORPORATION:

Though Sun was officially sold to Oracle, the corporation’s name and fame has its own uniqueness and will be remembered forever. After all it is the creator of the Java which is one of the most used programming languages world-wide.