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Sun Microsystems was a huge American company primarily concerned with retailing computers, components for computers and associated IT services. It is arguably most notable for the creation of Java programming code, the platform upon which so many computer and smartphone games rely.

The company, founded in 1982 by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla and Andy bechtolsheim was also responsible for the invention of the ZFS Network File System, the Solaris operating system and Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC).

Sun was also instrumental in the development of a number of technologies in the world of computing, amongst which are ‘thin client computing’, MySQL, virtualized computing, RISC processors, and Unix. At its very zenith, the headquarters of Sun Microsystems occupied a large section of Silicon Valley in California.

Before the Dot.com Bubble
In the 90s, it was all plain sailing and expansion for the company, as it made a great deal of money and its stock soared on the money markets. This led to increased investment and a swelling of their employee numbers, but this expansion was built on less than steady ground. They were unaware of it at the time, but only part of the boom was based on genuine demand.

Unfortunately, a good portion of the boom rested on the paradigm of web startup enterprises (.com businesses) and depended on revenue that would ultimately never materialise. At the beginning of the year 2000, the aforementioned bubble burst and its stock, sales and profit levels dropped through the floor. By 2001, the stock price had dropped to pre-boom levels and it showed little sign of recovery.

Factory Closures
Going into 2002, their share price sat at just a 10th of its former levels, at just $10 per share. Despite a brief rally, with the share price increasing to around $20 per share, Sun was forced to shut it’s Newark manufacturing plant and consolidate everything to its Oregon site.

Even though Sun’s shares were sitting at just a fifth of their former value, the company was still a multi-billion dollar enterprise and this was illustrated when it was purchased by the Oracle Corporation in April 2009 for a princely sum of $7.4bn.

This effectively brought down the curtain on Sun Microsystems, but the company will be forever remembered in the pantheon of IT history, as an innovator and a major contributor to the development of computing hardware.

Sun was also a significant player in open source software, as well as ‘open’ systems like Unix, which is a multi client OS designed to be adaptable and flexible. Developed in the 1970s, Unix represented the first ‘C’ operating language.