Logo used from the 1990s until acquisition by Oracle | |
Public | |
Industry |
Computer systems Computer software |
Fate | Acquired by Oracle |
Founded | February 24, 1982 |
Founders |
Andy Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Scott McNealy Vinod Khosla |
Defunct | January 27, 2010 |
Headquarters | Menlo Park, California, U.S. |
Products |
Servers Workstations Storage Services |
Owner | Oracle Corporation |
Number of employees
|
38,600 (near peak, 2006) |
Website |
www See Archived 17 January 2010 at the Wayback Machine. |
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services, and that created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, and the Network File System (NFS). Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
On January 27, 2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun by for US$7.4 billion, based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009.
Sun products included computer servers and workstations built on its own RISC-based SPARC processor architecture as well as on x86-based AMD's Opteron and Intel's Xeon processors; storage systems; and a suite of software products including the Solaris operating system, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Other technologies include the Java platform, MySQL, and NFS. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, and a major contributor to open-source software. At various times, Sun had manufacturing facilities in several locations worldwide, including Hillsboro, Oregon, Linlithgow, Scotland, and Newark, California; however, by the time the company was acquired, it had outsourced most manufacturing.