The Famous Names that Rose at Sun

Despite its brief history of just over twenty-five years, Sun MicroSystems' record of eminent employees is a long list indeed. Some are long-standing staff who helped Sun accomplish its innovative advances in the technology industry. Others are people who have worked with Sun for a few years before moving on to do greater things with their own companies. Still others are computing pioneers who were brought under the Sun umbrella when Sun acquired their companies. Although there is not near enough space in this article to do give each of them their due, we can at least briefly examine some of the more distinguished individuals.

To start, the founding members of Sun Microsystems - Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla - must be examined. Andy Bechtolsheim designed Sun's first Unix workstation while still a graduate student at Stanford Universtiy in Palo Alto for the Stanford University Network communications project. In 1982, fellow students Vinod Khosla and Scott MnNealy joined him in founding Sun MicroSystems in California's Silicon Valley. Bill Joy of Berkley joined them shortly after that, and is considered one of the company's founders.

Vinod Khosla left Sun three years later in 1985 to join a venture capital firm as a general partner. Bechtolsheim left Sun in 1995 to found Granite Systems, a company developing high-speed network switches, which was bought the next year by Cisco Systems. Bill Joy remained at Sun until 2003, where he a primary developer of BSD Unix, the vi editor, NFS, the Java programming language, and was a leading figure in the development of Sun's SPARC microprocessors. Scott McNealy became CEO of Sun in 1984 and guided it through twenty-two successful years of constant growth and innovation. He stepped down as CEO in 2004. Jonathan Schwartz took over the position, although McNealy remains at Sun as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Other notable Sun employees include people who worked at Sun before leaving to start their own legendary businesses. Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, for example, worked together at Sun for several years before leaving to found NVIDIA, the video graphics card giant. Jon Bosak of Sun led the creation of XML at the World Wide Web Consortium. Many former Sun employees ended up at Google, Inc. Peter Norvig, a Senior Scientist at Sun, is currently Google's Director of Research. George Reyes, a former Sun Vice President, is Google's CFO. And Eric Schmidt, the former Chief Technology Officer of Sun, went on to become CEO of Novell, and currently is CEO of Google.

Finally, many computer systems giants were brought into the Sun fold when Sun acquired their companies. For instance, Michael Widenius, the author of MySQL and co-founder of MySQL AB, is now associated with Sun Microsystems after Sun purchased their company in 2008. Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB, became a senior vice president of the database groups at Sun.

The role call could go on and on. In many ways, the list of names of people who have passed through Sun's doors reads like a biography of computer science history. On the other hand, given Sun's influential position within the computer industry and its long history of being on the cutting edge of computing innovation, its association with so many titans of technological history is not terribly surprising.