“The network is the computer.”
Sun Microsystems’ first slogan caused some head scratching back in the 1980s, years before the advent of the World Wide Web. “People made fun of that,” Sun co-founder Bill Joy recalled Wednesday. ”People would say, ‘No, the network is the network and the computer is the computer.’ ”
Now the old slogan is a reminder of Sun’s uncommon vision. Its first workstations, which predated the IBM personal computer, came with built-in Internet and Ethernet capabilities.
So as news swept Silicon Valley on Wednesday that Sun was in talks to be acquired by IBM, the reaction included a poignant, even bittersweet, sense of irony.
“In the early days,” recalled Joy, who left Sun in 2003, “we were always worried that IBM was going to drop an iceberg on us.”
Instead, Sun Microsystems has played a pioneering role in the evolution of computing and the business of technology — one reason Sun is regarded with uncommon affection among techies. In addition to its ahead-of-the-curve vision, Sun is admired for its creation of the popular Java programming language and its support of open-source business models in recent years, industry observers say.
The company that began with Stanford University computer-science student Andy Bechtolsheim tinkering on the first workstation as part of a project called Stanford University Network — the acronym for which became the ”Sun” in Sun Microsystems — would usher in a new way of computing.
Instead of computers bound to discrete silos of hardware and software, Sun pioneered “the open-system approach to the computer market,” enabling software to run on different systems, explained John Gilmore, an early Sun engineer. Sun’s work, he said, contributed to the “evolutionary” movement toward open-source software.
Sun achieved profitability in its first quarter, but Wall Street would fall out of love with the company years later with the dot-com crash. Yet history, as IBM’s interest attests, has long since validated Sun’s early vision that computing chores would be distributed across a network of machines, rather than concentrated in central locations, suggested Alex Bochannek, a curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, home to several of Sun’s early workstations.
While Apple was known for simplifying computing for the masses in the 1980s, Sun’s early workstations were adored by engineers. Later it developed the popular Java programming language and promoted an “open-source” business model, both of which were applauded by software developers, said RedMonk software analyst Michael Coté.
And Silicon Valley business lords have long appreciated Sun and its chairman, Scott McNealy, as key warriors in the valley’s old antitrust battles with Microsoft.
Sun has also been a training ground for valley CEOs. Its executive alumni include Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz and Cassatt Software’s Bill Coleman, who also founded BEA Systems.
“If Scott was running a school for CEOs,” Joy said, ”he did a really good job.”
Coleman, who worked at Sun from 1985 until 1995, recalled the period as “a rocket ship ride.” The company reached $1 billion in revenue in six years.
Some of Sun’s recent business troubles, RedMonk’s Coté suggested, lie in part in its habit of delivering ideas before the market was ready to adopt them. Joy, now a venture partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers focusing on clean tech, agreed: “When you have a solution to a problem that people don’t know they have, it makes it hard for the sales guy.”
For all its success, Sun has always been better at creating technology than profiting from it, several observers said. The company’s stock soared during the dot-com boom because so many dot-coms ran on Sun servers.
Sun even rolled out a new slogan, suggesting that the company was the “dot” in dot-com. That bit of marketing — ”egotistical,” Joy called it — backfired with the dot-com crash.
“I’m sure they prefer their earlier slogan,” Coté said.
Contact Scott Duke Harris at sdharris@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2704.
