David J. Brown

David J. Brown is an American computer scientist. He was one of a small group that helped to develop the system at Stanford that later resulted in Sun Microsystems, and later was a founder Silicon Graphics in 1982.

Brown received his primary and secondary school education in New York City, and then studied at the University of Pennsylvania, Moore School of Electrical Engineering where he received a B.S.E. in 1979 and an M.S.E under the tutelage of Ruzena Bajcsy in 1980.

In 1984, Brown was introduced to David Wheeler, who invited him to join the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory as a doctoral candidate. In October 1986, he matriculated at St John's College, University of Cambridge, England to pursue a Ph.D. His dissertation introduced the concept of Unified Memory Architecture. This idea has subsequently been widely applied — most notably by Intel in their processors and platform architecture of the late 1990s and onward.

Brown became a member of the research staff in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University in 1981, where he helped develop the research edition of the SUN workstation with Andreas Bechtolsheim, prior to the establishment of Sun Microsystems.