Facebook kept Sun Microsystems' old sign as a warning to itself
When Facebook moved into Sun Microsystems' former Menlo Park campus in 2011, Mark Zuckerberg did not tear down the entrance sign. He had it flipped around and put Facebook's logo on the other side, leaving Sun's name on the back as a reminder of what happens when a company takes its eye off the ball.
Sun's name came from the Stanford University Network. Graduate student Andy Bechtolsheim designed a workstation for that project, building the first units from spare parts scavenged from Stanford's computer science department and Silicon Valley suppliers. On February 24, 1982, he founded the company with fellow Stanford students Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla, and Berkeley's Bill Joy soon joined as a fourth founder. Sun turned a profit from its very first quarter. Its logo, designed by Stanford professor Vaughan Pratt, spells sun four times in a pattern that reads the same when rotated.
Sun's workstations became favourites on Wall Street and in engineering, and by 1989 InfoWorld called it the undisputed leader of the field. The company championed open systems, especially Unix, and created the Java programming language and the Network File System. It went public in 1986 under the ticker SUNW, then swapped it for JAVA in 2007 because the language had become better known than the firm.
The dot-com bubble lifted its stock as high as $250 a share, and Sun hired and built heavily for web start-ups whose business never materialised. After the crash in 2000 hardware sales collapsed as failed customers auctioned off servers, and within about two years the shares had sunk below $10. In February 2005 it tried renting computing power through Sun Grid at one dollar per processor hour, an early version of what is now called cloud computing.
Oracle agreed to buy Sun in April 2009 for $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion after subtracting cash and debt, completing the deal on January 27, 2010, after European regulators studied the fate of the MySQL database Sun had bought for $1 billion.
Source: Sun Microsystems
