Definition of Sun Microsystems

The world of technology is not alien to the existence of myths, whether they are alive or dead, as in the case of football or any other area of ​​interest in life. And, as in the case of sport football, in which myths can be players, alignments that will no longer repeat themselves, clubs or parties, in the world of technology we also find myths such as people or Business. Sun Microsystems is one such case.

The birth of this mythical company is not exempt, precisely, from mythology: after building its first workstations with discarded remains of other computers at Stanford University in Palo Alto (one of the "meccas" existing technologies), the founders (Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy) founded Sun in 1982.

The company was born with the idea of ​​manufacturing and providing complete systems, initially workstations under Unix BSD, to which servers and system and network administration tools were added, and programming

With this, the

strategy It grew out of the emerging Sun, leading the company to create its own BSD-based variant of UNIX, which it "imaginatively" dubbed SunOS. Later, and now renamed Solaris (a name that it still has today ”, it was brought to a System V base in the early 90's.

Sun Microsystems is also famous for having been the company in which, in the early 1990s, the language of programming and Java software execution platform, one of its flagship products to the point that the company changed its call sign on the stock market from the reference to its Sun name, to the reference to Java.

With Java, Sun sought to bring to fruition the idea of ​​“the computer Is the network”, Far ahead of the concept of cloud in a time when the networks did not offer enough velocity not enough hardware benefits as to allow the local computer to run a operating system remote, resident on a server (today we would say that on the cloud).

Java was a kind of imitation of that failure, a language that, theoretically, allowed you to program only once and run on any machine that had a Java interpreter. And I say theoretically because, in practice, reality was far from this intention.

Its operations include a highly successful acquisition that made it very popular, and a more controversial one. The first was StarOffice, a multiplatform office suite created by StarDivision.

This allowed him to open the code source of the program in the OpenOffice project, the immediate predecessor of the current LibreOffice suite, in an initiative that made it very popular with the free software community. OpenOffice was needed to provide Solaris with an alternative to Microsoft Office.

A part of the credit between the community open source gained from the previous operation was squandered with the acquisition of MySQL, with which there was fear that Sun would close its development.

There was even more fear on all fronts when, in 2010, Sun was acquired by Oracle ...

The acquisition of Sun by Oracle came after the not complete overcoming of the dot-com bubble, and the global economic crisis

Sun had bet heavily on future businesses that either were delayed over time thereby damaging the investments, or they did not materialize directly.

The purchase transaction by Oracle was announced in 2009, and was approved by the regulatory authorities in early 2010.

With this, Oracle gained its own software platform (Solaris), and a hardware business that allowed it to add to its database solutions, not only the stack of software necessary, but also the hardware to provide the whole complete system.

This meant the death of a mythical brand, Sun Microsystems, which was eventually replaced by Oracle, thereby becoming part of the mythology of the technology community.

Photos: Fotolia - Marija Piliponyte / djvstock

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