Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services and that created the Java programming language and the Network File System (NFS). Sun significantly evolved 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, 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, Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation for US $7.4 billion, based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009. The following month, Sun Microsystems, Inc. was merged with Oracle USA, Inc. to become Oracle America, Inc. 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. Sun’s main manufacturing facilities were located in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Linlithgow, Scotland.