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October 6, 2019 08:39 pm

When Sun Microsystems' Founders and Former Employees Hold a Reunion

Last week Infoworld reported on a reunion of more than 1,000 former employees of Sun Microsystems including all four founders of the company -- Andreas Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy -- at just their second reunion since the 2010 Oracle acquisition.Prior to the formal festivities, the company founders met with a small group of press persons. Pondering recent developments in computing, Bill Joy, who is now concentrating on climate change solutions, recalled that Sun tried to do natural language processing, but the hardware was not fast enough. Regarding the emergence of the iPhone, Joy said the advent of mobility and data networks has been transformational for society. He noted that Sun had that kind of vision with Java ME, with Sun trying to do programmable smartphones. "But the hardware was just really nascent at the time," Joy said. Machine learning, though, will be as transformational as the smartphone, he added. McNealy emphasized Sun's willingness to share technology, such as the Network File System (NFS), which helped to bring about the open source software movement now prevalent today. "We didn't invent open source but we [made it] happen. We were the leader of that parade." Asked if Sun should have moved from Sparc Risc processors and Solaris Unix to Intel processors and Linux, McNealy said he did not want to talk about mistakes he had made as Sun CEO but such a switch was not what Sun should have done.... Among those proudest of Sun's achievements was Sun founder and CEO Scott McNealy, who, taking the stage, had some sharp words for Facebook, which now occupies one of Sun's former Silicon Valley campuses, without mentioning Facebook by name. "I remember some company moved into one of our old headquarters buildings," McNealy said. "And the CEO said, we're going to leave the [Sun Microsystems] logos up because we want everybody in our company to remember what can happen to you if you don't pay attention. This company could do well to do one-one-hundredth of what we did."

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