Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer hardware, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. At its height, Sun's headquarters were in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. Sun products included computer servers and workstations built using Motorola 680x0 processors, then later their own RISC-based SPARC processor architecture, as well as on x86-based AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors. Sun also developed its own storage systems and a suite of software products, including the Unix-based SunOS and later Solaris operating systems, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Technologies that Sun created include the Java programming language, the Java platform and Network File System (NFS). In general, Sun was a proponent of open systems, particularly Unix. It was also a major contributor to open-source software, as evidenced by its $1 billion purchase, in 2008, of MySQL, an open-source relational database management system. Other notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. On April 20, 2009, it was announced that Oracle would acquire Sun for US$7.4 billion, or US$5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The deal was completed on January 27, 2010.