Documentation of Operating Systems and Developers

Sun Company

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was founded by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim in the Californian Silicon Valley on 1982-02-24. Sun Microsystems GmbH was set up in 1984 in Munich, sales offices are established in Ratingen, Berlin, Hamburg and Stuttgart. The same year NFS (Network File System) from Sun is introduced and free lciensed to other companies.

The first workstation of Sun is the Sun-1 with SunOS as operating system. The Motorola CPU was clocked with 6 MHz, the RAM was 1 mbyte and the hard disk was equipped with 60 mbyte. In 1983 the successor Sun-2 appeared with 10 MHz CPU, up to 7 mbyte RAM and supported one large hard disk up to 380 mbyte . In 1985 the Sun-3 serie was equipped with CPUs of up to 25 MHz and up to 32 mbyte of RAM. The first Sun-4 models were published with the own SPARC V7 RISC architecture in 1987. In 1989 Sun's SPARC station 1 was available for less than 9,000 dollars and overhauled the performance of previous desktop systems with 12.5 MIPS. Solaris 2 of SunSoft was published in 1991, the first revised version based on UNIX SVR4 and for Intel x86 systems. in 1994 the first 64-bit Ultra-SPARC processor and 1995 the first Java specifikation released.

AOL and Sun form 1998 a strategic partnership, Sun introduces the specification for Java 2. Solaris 7 is published as new 64-bit operating system environment for network computing. A renewed benchmark record is obtained for SAP System R/3 on Sun enterprise 10000 servers. Sun is a worldwide leading UNIX server provider after sold quantities, the HPC 10000 server has a top position in supercomputing. A cooperation between BULL AG and Sun Microsystems GmbH is agreed. Sun announces extensive educational consulting services and created a new competence centre for network computing technologies.
Sun gives the specification for the Jiro platform for a platform independent memory management free in 1999, Novells NDS eDirectory is available for the Sun platform now. Sun Solaris runs on 64-bit Itanium processor of Intel and Sun reached an new world record at the TPC-C benchmark. Sun gets the SAP Award of Excellence 1999 and got the 100th order for the Sun enterprise 10000 high performance server in Germany.

In the year 2000 Sun is confirmed as a market leader in the UNIX server market, Sun Cluster 3.0 sets standards in the management of complex networks. The StarOffice source code with about 9,000,000 lines of code is now freely accessibly. The Solaris 8 source code is also available under a restrictive licence for research and development. The Sun StorEdge T3 system scales up to 169 terabyte of hard disk storage, Sun delivers the fastest Java platform for Linux. The first workstation with Ultra SPARC III CPU is released. Sun takes the company Cobalt Networks. A new version of the Java 2 platform is introduced and Solaris 8 is worldwide available now.

With an annual sales volume of 18.3 billion U.S. dollars Sun is already 2001 represented in over 170 countries with about 37,500 employees worldwide. Sun Microsystems GmbH with approx. 1,800 employees achieved a sales volume of 2.338 billion DM unlike the previous year with only 1.766 billion DM in this financial year. Sun is the leading manufacturer of UNIX workstation and servers (sources: Dataquest, IDC). Sun Systems are the most successful platform for relational databases under UNIX as well as for use of SAP R/3 under UNIX. Sun is a leading provider of technologies in numerous application areas like in the development of electronic, the mechanical construction, in the software engineering, at the print and online media as well as in the telecommunication sector and the finance economy. According to the numbers published by Gartner Dataquest (Q1/2001) Sun Microsystems is the no.1 in the U.S. UNIX server market and worldwide no. 2 in the total market for servers of all operating systems. Sun increased his market share by 19 percent this year and keeps a market share of 32 percent now. Sun workstation reached worldwide with estimated 432 million dollars sales volume 20 percent market share (Q1/2001) of all saled workstations including NT and UNIX systems (IDC 05/01). Sun announced the new clustering solution for supercomputing environments and reached a benchmark record result for midframe systems. Sun sponsers 8 million lines of source code for SunSource.net, Sun introduces JXTA. The new Sun Fire product line with UltraSPARC-III processors is starting from the Sun Fire 3800 (up to 8 CPUs and 64 gbyte RAM) to the Sun Fire 6800 (up to 24 CPUs and 192 gbyte RAM) available. The new Sun Fire server obtains a benchmark record with the Oracle e-business suite. The Sun Blade 100 is the first 64 bit UNIX workstation for DM 3,000, Sun ONE Webtop becomes establishedly as technology for open web services.

In response to the .NET strategy of Microsoft Sun puts in 2002 on the ONE (Open Network environment) strategy. With the LX50 server you can use Sun Linux 5.0 based on Red Hat Linux and Solaris 8.0 as an operating system. On booth operating systems mySQL, the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), the Apache Web server, Sun Grid Engine and further components are usably.

In March 2003 Sun announced the cancel of the own Linux distribution, but for this Sun supports selected standard Linux distributions. The "Orion" initiative which shall guarantee the faultless execution of Linux programs for Solaris was started at the same time. Sun and Microsoft announced a better cooperation at the beginning of April 2004. The settlement of all legal disputes is included. In return Microsoft pays 1.95 billion U.S. dollars to Sun. Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer met each other to spoke around the further common approach. They assured themselves of the mutual payment of licence fees for the use of patents and techniques. Target shall be the lowering of the development and research costs. This agreement shall not have influence on the competition of the two enterprises in the economy. Sun showed the take-over of the company Tarantella for about 25 million U.S. dollars on May 10th, 2005. The transaction shall be completed in the 1st quarter 2006. Tt the beginning of July 2005 the plan became known to publish the own Java Desktop System (JDS) in source code also. It is based on the gnome desktop and the SuSE Linux distribution. JDS shall become the standard interface for Solaris and shall replace the meanwhile out-dated CDE user interface in the further course. Sun differs with that from his Linux/JDS initiative for an alternative to Windows and concentrates his resources on OpenSolaris/JDS now.
2005 Sun publishes the 128-bit file system ZFS for Solaris, the processor UltraSPARC T1 also is introduced. The Solaris kernel and important libraries are published as open source for the OpenSolaris project. Solaris 10 is licensed within 2 months about 1 million times for x86 and SPARC systems, Sun presents the 3D desktop Looking Glass on the CeBIT in 2005.

2006 the x86 server systems Fire X4600 with Opteron processors, the Storage server X4500 and Sun Blade 8000 are introduced. The mySAP business suite and SAP NetWeaver for x64 Sun Solaris 10 operating system are available now. Sun publishes completely the design documents for UltraSPARC architecture. The dual processor workstation Ultra 40 with Opteron CPUs as well as Ultra 45 with UltraSPARC-III CPUs hit the market now. Java got open source.

Business fields

- Network Computing (network computer systems)
- Sun workstation, Ultra workstation
- Sun Ray Thin client, Sun Ray product familiy
- Sun enterprise server, server family
- Network Storage, Sun StorEdge storage systems
- NetraT Internet server
- Chip components, periphery devices
- Network components

Software products & services

- JavaOS
- Java desktop system (Linux distribution)
- Java technology, "Write Once, run Anywhere"
- Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE)
- Jini Technology, "The network is the computer"
- Sun ONE (Open Network Environment)
- Sun ONE Forte for Java and Forte fusion
- Sun ONE Webtop
- Firewall SunScreen
- Sun Chilli!Soft ASP web server
- Star Office 7.0 as a complete office suit
- Open Office 1.1 as a complete office suit
- Sun Solaris operating system
- Sun system availability service
- Sun professional services
- Internet security solutions
- 8 million lines of source code released on SunSource.net
- Forte for Java Release 3.0
- Sun Cluster 3.0 software (for Oracle 9i real application cluster)
This list does not lay any claim to completeness.

Photo from 1984 with employees of Sun Microsystems	UltraSPARC I processor	UltraSPARC II processor	UltraSPARC III processor
Sun Blade[TM] 1000 workstation	Sun Blade[TM] 100 workstation	Sun Solaris8 retail box	Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer, 2004
StarOffice 8.0

• JavaOS
• Solaris
• Sun Microsystems

• Glossary
• PDA, Smartphones
• File systems
• Kernel definitions
• CPU architectures
• Basic knowledge
• References
• This Project
• Link collection
• Support Project