Friday, October 9, 2009

Sun Microsystems

Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems by Mark Hall and John Barry gives an overview of the then short history of Sun. The authors attempted to write the book in a formal way with charts and graphs of the workstation market sprinkeld with anecdotes of its founding and its founders. It also explores the implications of Sun's strategy of licensing NFS, its Sparc chip and its adoption of UNIX and its attempt to adhere to "open" standards. This book is pretty much old stuff by now but was at the time an attempt o explain to the public Sun's strategy.

Now that Sun has agreed to sell itself to Oracle it may be time for a book called Sunset. The person who seemd to truly achieved his dream was Vinod Khosla who wanted to retire (forced out by the directors actually) by the time he was 30, made wealthy by the Sun IPO. He only had to work 3 years at Sun. Prior to that he had worked at Daisy Systems which specialized in CAD for engineers. It was at this time that he thought that a cheap workstation using off the shelf parts could be manufactured. Teaming up with Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy they founded Sun Microsystems.

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