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.