Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)

a year ago

The author joined Sun Microsystems as employee #8, 40 years ago.
Before Sun, the author worked at Amdahl Corp., porting UNIX to mainframes and later working on data communications.
The author had prior interactions with Bill Joy and BSD UNIX, which led to his recruitment at Sun.
During the early 1980s, there was intense startup fever in Silicon Valley, with many companies focusing on UNIX and Motorola 68000 technologies.
The author considered other startups like Valid Logic Systems and Fortune Systems but wasn't interested in their focus areas (CAD and word processing).
The author's brothers, who worked at Xerox, provided insights into workstations and introduced him to the SUN project at Stanford.
Scott McNealy called the author out of the blue, leading to an interview with Sun's founders, including Andy Bechtolsheim and Vinod Khosla.
Bill Joy's involvement with Sun was a key factor in the author's decision to join.
The author negotiated stock options and accepted the offer, despite initial financial concerns.
The author's first success at Sun was fixing a critical disk driver bug in UNISOFT UNIX, enabling UNIX to ship with Sun-1 workstations.
Within a year, Sun grew rapidly, shipping workstations with BSD UNIX, 68010 processors, and 10Mb Ethernet.

Hasty Briefsbeta