Sun Microsystems was a computer company founded in 1982 that built Unix workstations and servers and became a leading voice for networked computing. In his Computer History Museum oral history, co-founder Bill Joy states plainly that he went “to school at the University of Michigan and at Berkeley before starting Sun Microsystems in 1982.”
Joy describes in the same interview how the company came together. Andy Bechtolsheim, who had designed the workstation hardware at Stanford, joined with Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla, and the founders recognized they needed a software person. Joy, who had led the Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix, brought that operating system expertise to the new venture as its software architect.
The company carried the Berkeley Unix tradition into commercial products. Sun’s machines ran a Unix derived from BSD, and the firm promoted open networking technologies, including a high-performance TCP/IP stack and network file sharing, that fit its outlook that computing was fundamentally about connected machines rather than isolated ones.
Over the following decades Sun became known for its SPARC processor line, the Network File System (NFS), and the Java programming platform, extending the Berkeley and Unix heritage that Joy had helped create into a long line of networked systems.