58 Facts About Sun Microsystems

1.

Sun Microsystems, Inc was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors.

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2.

Sun Microsystems contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing.

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3.

Notable Sun Microsystems acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox.

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4.

At its height, the Sun Microsystems headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

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5.

Sun Microsystems products included computer servers and workstations built on its own RISC-based SPARC processor architecture, as well as on x86-based AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors.

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6.

Sun Microsystems developed its own storage systems and a suite of software products, including the Solaris operating system, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications.

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7.

At various times, Sun Microsystems had manufacturing facilities in several locations worldwide, including Newark, California; Hillsboro, Oregon; and Linlithgow, Scotland.

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8.

Sun Microsystems built the first examples from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.

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9.

The Sun Microsystems name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network.

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10.

Sun Microsystems was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.

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11.

The symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA; Sun Microsystems stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the company's current strategy.

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12.

In mid-2004, Sun Microsystems closed their Newark, California, factory and consolidated all manufacturing to Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.

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13.

In 2004, Sun Microsystems canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high instruction-level parallelism and operating frequency.

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14.

Sun Microsystems announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use the Japanese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers.

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15.

Sun Microsystems had engineering groups in Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, Prague, St Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Canberra and Trondheim.

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16.

In September 2004, Sun Microsystems made available systems with UltraSPARC IV which was the first multi-core SPARC processor.

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17.

In November 2005, Sun Microsystems launched the UltraSPARC T1, notable for its ability to concurrently run 32 threads of execution on 8 processor cores.

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18.

Sun Microsystems has open sourced the design specifications of both the T1 and T2 processors via the OpenSPARC project.

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19.

Since 2010, all further development of Sun Microsystems machines based on SPARC architecture is done as a part of Oracle Corporation hardware division.

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20.

In 1997, Sun Microsystems acquired Diba, Inc, followed later by the acquisition of Cobalt Networks in 2000, with the aim of building network appliances.

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21.

Sun Microsystems marketed a Network Computer; the JavaStation was a diskless system designed to run Java applications.

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22.

In 2002, Sun Microsystems introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50, based in part on previous Cobalt system expertise.

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23.

On September 12, 2005, Sun Microsystems unveiled a new range of Opteron-based servers: the Sun Microsystems Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers.

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24.

Sun Microsystems began using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with the Sun Microsystems Blade X6250 server module introduced in June 2007.

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25.

Sun Microsystems later developed software such as the Java programming language and acquired software such as StarOffice, VirtualBox and MySQL.

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26.

Sun Microsystems used community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies.

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27.

Sun Microsystems's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software.

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28.

Sun Microsystems is best known for its Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.

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29.

From 1992 Sun Microsystems sold Interactive Unix, an operating system it acquired when it bought Interactive Systems Corporation from Eastman Kodak Company.

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30.

Sun Microsystems's focus on Interactive Unix diminished in favor of Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems; it was dropped as a product in 2001.

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31.

Sun Microsystems supported both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on its x64 systems; companies such as Canonical Ltd.

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32.

In 2004, after having cultivated a reputation as one of Microsoft's most vocal antagonists, Sun Microsystems entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving US$1.

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33.

Sun Microsystems supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each other's virtualization environments.

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34.

Previously, Sun Microsystems offered a separate variant of Solaris called Trusted Solaris, which included augmented security features such as multilevel security and a least privilege access model.

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35.

On November 13, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced it would be licensing its Java implementation under the GNU General Public License; it released its Java compiler and JVM at that time.

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36.

In February 2009, Sun Microsystems entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet.

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37.

In 1999, Sun Microsystems acquired the German software company Star Division and with it the office suite StarOffice, which Sun Microsystems later released as OpenOffice.

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38.

In 2007, Sun Microsystems announced the Sun Microsystems xVM virtualization and datacenter automation product suite for commodity hardware.

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39.

Sun Microsystems marketed Sun Microsystems Ops Center provisioning software for datacenter automation.

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40.

In February 2008, Sun Microsystems began to publish results of the MySQL performance optimization work.

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41.

Sun Microsystems offered other software products for software development and infrastructure services.

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42.

Sun Microsystems acquired many of the Netscape non-browser software products as part a deal involving Netscape's merger with AOL.

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43.

Sun Microsystems produced compilers and development tools under the Sun Microsystems Studio brand, for building and developing Solaris and Linux applications.

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44.

Sun Microsystems entered the software as a service market with zembly, a social cloud-based computing platform and Project Kenai, an open-source project hosting service.

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45.

Sun Microsystems sold its own storage systems to complement its system offerings; it has made several storage-related acquisitions.

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46.

On June 2, 2005, Sun Microsystems announced it would purchase Storage Technology Corporation for US$4.

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47.

In 2006, Sun Microsystems introduced the Sun Microsystems StorageTek 5800 System, the first application-aware programmable storage solution.

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48.

In 2008, Sun Microsystems contributed the source code of the StorageTek 5800 System under the BSD license.

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49.

Sun Microsystems announced the Sun Microsystems Open Storage platform in 2008 built with open source technologies.

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50.

In late 2008 Sun Microsystems announced the Sun Microsystems Storage 7000 Unified Storage systems.

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51.

Sun Microsystems marketed the Sun Microsystems Constellation System for high-performance computing.

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52.

Sun Microsystems HPC ClusterTools product was a set of Message Passing Interface libraries and tools for running parallel jobs on Solaris HPC clusters.

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53.

In 2006, Sun Microsystems built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia.

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54.

Sun Microsystems built Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in 2007.

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55.

Sun Microsystems announced an OpenSolaris distribution that integrated Sun Microsystems's HPC products with others.

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56.

Notable Sun Microsystems employees included John Gilmore, Whitfield Diffie, Radia Perlman, Ivan Sutherland, and Marc Tremblay.

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57.

In 2005, Sun Microsystems was one of the first Fortune 500 companies that instituted a formal Social Media program.

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58.

Sun Microsystems's staff were asked to share anecdotes about their experiences at Sun Microsystems.

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