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82-413: OpenStep was principally developed by NeXT and Sun Microsystems , to allow advanced application development on Sun's operating systems, specifically Solaris . NeXT produced a version of OpenStep for its own Mach -based Unix OS, stylized in all capital letters as OPENSTEP . The software libraries that shipped with OPENSTEP are a superset of the original OpenStep specification, including many features from

164-522: A free software implementation of the NeXT libraries, began at the time of NeXTSTEP, predating OPENSTEP. While OPENSTEP and OSE were purchased by Apple, who effectively ended the commercial development of implementing OpenStep for other platforms, GNUstep is an ongoing open source project aiming to create a portable, free software implementation of the Cocoa/OPENSTEP libraries. GNUstep also features

246-567: A $ 10 million investment from Sun into NeXT. The deal was described as "the first unadulterated piece of good news in the NeXT community in the last four years". The basic concept was to take a cut-down version of the NeXTSTEP operating system 's object layers and adapt them to run on Sun's Solaris operating system, more specifically, Solaris on SPARC -based hardware. Most of the OpenStep effort

328-406: A 'traditional' Unix like Solaris was not all that difficult, although Unix makes the assumption that all programs run locally, and an interface for remote access had to be added. For this, DOE added an object request broker (ORB) that ran on the backoffice servers, listening for DOE requests and handing them off to the proper program to be handled. During development, CORBA became a key buzzword in

410-465: A 20% stake in Sun. UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun. Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2.x, which became the successor to SunOS 4.1.x (later retroactively named Solaris 1.x). By the mid-1990s, the ensuing Unix wars had largely subsided, AT&T had sold off their Unix interests, and the relationship between the two companies was significantly reduced. In

492-416: A consistent design philosophy. Sun's first workstation shipped with UniSoft V7 Unix . Later in 1982 Sun began providing SunOS , a customized 4.2BSD Unix, as the operating system for its workstations. SunOS included suntools , an early GUI window system . In the late 1980s, AT&T tapped Sun to help them develop the next release of their branded UNIX, and in 1988 announced they would purchase up to

574-518: A fully functional development environment, reimplementations of some of the newer innovations from macOS's Cocoa framework, as well as its own extensions to the API. Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. ( Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers , computer components , software , and information technology services and created the Java programming language ,

656-497: A line of x64 systems that support not only Solaris, but also Linux and Microsoft Windows . In January 2007 Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with Intel . Intel endorsed Solaris as a mainstream operating system and as its mission critical Unix for its Xeon processor–based systems, and contributed engineering resources to OpenSolaris . Sun began using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with

738-713: A net GAAP profit of $ 126 million on revenue of $ 3.337 billion for its fiscal second quarter. Shortly following that news, it was announced that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) would invest $ 700 million in the company. Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore , Beijing , Dublin , Grenoble , Hamburg , Prague , St. Petersburg , Tel Aviv , Tokyo , Canberra and Trondheim . In 2007–2008, Sun posted revenue of $ 13.8 billion and had $ 2 billion in cash. First-quarter 2008 losses were $ 1.68 billion; revenue fell 7% to $ 12.99 billion. Sun's stock lost 80% of its value November 2007 to November 2008, reducing

820-682: A primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders. The company was the second, after rival Apollo Computer , to specialize in workstations. The name "Sun" is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network (SUN). Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982. By 1983, Sun was known for producing 68k-based systems with high-quality graphics that were

902-437: A reputation as one of Microsoft 's most vocal antagonists, Sun entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving US$ 1.95 billion in settlement payments from them. Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each other's virtualization environments. In 2005,

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984-498: A reworked version of OPENSTEP for Mach for both the Mac and standard PCs. Rhapsody was OPENSTEP for Mach with a Copland appearance from Mac OS 8 and support for Java and Apple's own technologies, including ColorSync and QuickTime ; it could be regarded as OPENSTEP 5. Two developer versions of Rhapsody were released, known as Developer Preview 1 and 2; these ran on a limited subset of both Intel and PowerPC hardware. Mac OS X Server 1.0

1066-532: A separate package called Workshop OpenStep. NeXT also delivered an implementation running on top of Windows NT 4.0 called OPENSTEP Enterprise (often abbreviated OSE). This was an unintentional demonstration on the true nature of the portability of programs created under the OpenStep specification. Programs for OPENSTEP for Mach could be ported to OSE with little difficulty. This allowed their existing customer base to continue using their tools and applications, but running them on Windows, to which many of them were in

1148-426: A side effect of being able to be called from many programs, these systems also defined a standard way to call them, using an interface definition language , or IDL, to allow any language on the platform to understand the code inside the library. Extending these systems to support remote procedure calls behind the scenes was seen as a natural evolution, providing a solution to the client/server programming problem. At

1230-691: A suite of software products, including the Solaris operating system , developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Technologies included the Java platform and 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 . At various times, Sun had manufacturing facilities in several locations worldwide, including Newark, California ; Hillsboro, Oregon ; and Linlithgow, Scotland . However, by

1312-479: A variety of 3rd party companies with no interest in standardization. Nevertheless, this problem was being addressed in the early 1990s through the introduction of various shared library systems. These were actually intended to ease resource use on smaller platforms, by allowing a number of programs using a common resource, like the GUI, to share a single copy of code instead of each loading a separate copy into memory. As

1394-484: A variety of pricing bases, including per-employee and per-socket. A 2006 report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT stated that Sun was the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world. According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors. Sun is best known for its Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and

1476-475: Is Solaris 10 1/13. Distributed Objects Everywhere Distributed Objects Everywhere ( DOE ) was a long-running Sun Microsystems project to build a distributed computing environment based on the CORBA system in the 'back end' and OpenStep as the user interface. First started in 1990 and announced soon thereafter, it remained vaporware for many years before it was finally released as NEO in 1995. It

1558-518: Is an SMP capable version of UltraSPARC T2, available in 2 or 4 processor configurations. It was the first CoolThreads CPU with multi-processor capability and it made possible to build standard rack-mounted servers that could simultaneously process up to massive 256 CPU threads in hardware (Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440), which is considered a record in the industry. Since 2010, all further development of Sun machines based on SPARC architecture (including new SPARC T-Series servers, SPARC T3 and T4 chips)

1640-604: Is an increasing need to reduce power and air conditioning demands, much of which comes from the heat generated by CPUs. The T1 was followed in 2007 by the UltraSPARC T2 , which extended the number of threads per core from 4 to 8. Sun has open sourced the design specifications of both the T1 and T2 processors via the OpenSPARC project. In 2006, Sun ventured into the blade server (high density rack-mounted systems) market with

1722-509: Is done as a part of Oracle Corporation hardware division. In the late 1980s, Sun also marketed an Intel 80386 –based machine, the Sun386i ; this was designed to be a hybrid system, running SunOS but at the same time supporting DOS applications. This only remained on the market for a brief time. A follow-up "486i" upgrade was announced but only a few prototype units were ever manufactured. Sun's brief first foray into x86 systems ended in

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1804-432: Is now named macOS. macOS's primary programming environment is essentially OpenStep (with certain additions such as XML property lists and URL classes for Internet connections) with macOS ports of the development libraries and tools, now called Cocoa . macOS has since become the single most popular desktop Unix-like operating system in the world, although macOS is no longer an OpenStep compliant operating system. GNUstep,

1886-503: The Dock and Shelf , and so on), and retained the classic NeXTSTEP user interface and styles. OPENSTEP for Mach was further improved, in comparison to NeXTSTEP 3.3, with vastly improved driver support – however the environment to actually write drivers was changed with the introduction of the object-oriented DriverKit. OPENSTEP for Mach supported Intel x86-based PC's, Sun's SPARC workstations, and NeXT's own 68k-based architectures, while

1968-824: The SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation . It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first examples from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses. On February 24, 1982, Scott McNealy , Andy Bechtolsheim , and Vinod Khosla , all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems . Bill Joy of Berkeley,

2050-482: The Solaris operating system , ZFS , the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors . Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix , RISC processors , thin client computing, and virtualized computing . Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division , Storagetek , and Innotek GmbH , creators of VirtualBox . Sun

2132-646: The Sun Blade (distinct from the Sun Blade workstation). In April 2007, Sun released the SPARC Enterprise server products, jointly designed by Sun and Fujitsu and based on Fujitsu SPARC64 VI and later processors. The M-class SPARC Enterprise systems include high-end reliability and availability features. Later T-series servers have also been badged SPARC Enterprise rather than Sun Fire. In April 2008, Sun released servers with UltraSPARC T2 Plus, which

2214-556: The Sun-1 through Sun-3 computer series. The Sun-1 employed a 68000 CPU, the Sun-2 series, a 68010 . The Sun-3 series was based on the 68020 , with the later Sun-3x using the 68030 . In 1987, the company began using SPARC , a RISC processor architecture of its own design, in its computer systems, starting with the Sun-4 line. SPARC was initially a 32-bit architecture (SPARC V7) until

2296-582: The dot-com bubble , Sun began making more money, with its stock rising as high as $ 250 per share. It also began spending much more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of genuine demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. In 2000, the bubble burst. Sales in Sun's important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop and auctioned high-end servers. Several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001,

2378-505: The Foundation Kit technologies, combined with new libraries to provide remote invocation with very little code. Unlike OpenStep, which defined an operating system that applications would run in, under PDO the libraries were compiled into the application itself, creating a stand-alone "native" application for a particular platform. PDO was small enough to be easily portable, and versions were released for all major server vendors. In

2460-617: The HP PA-RISC version was dropped. These versions continued to run on the underlying Mach-based OS used in NeXTSTEP. OPENSTEP for Mach became NeXT's primary OS from 1995 on, and was used mainly on the Intel platform. In addition to being a complete OpenStep implementation, the system was delivered with a complete set of NeXTSTEP libraries for backward compatibility. This was an easy thing to do in OpenStep due to library versioning, and OPENSTEP did not suffer in bloat because of it. In addition to

2542-797: The Japanese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on April 17, 2007, as the M-Series, part of the SPARC Enterprise series. In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid , a grid computing deployment on which it offered utility computing services priced at US$ 1 per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering built upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, which Sun marketed as being able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005,

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2624-532: The LX50, based in part on previous Cobalt system expertise. This was also Sun's first system announced to support Linux as well as Solaris. In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD to produce x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor; this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim , which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers. The following year, Sun launched

2706-517: The NeXTSTEP look and feel as much as possible, and integrating the NeXT development tools, such as Project Builder and Interface Builder, with the SunPro compiler. In order to provide a complete end-user environment, Sun also ported the NeXTSTEP-3.3 versions of several end-user applications, including Mail.app, Preview.app, Edit.app, Workspace Manager, and the Dock . The OpenStep and CORBA parts of

2788-525: The Newark campus was put on the market. In 2004, Sun canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high instruction-level parallelism and operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for multi-threading and multiprocessing , such as the UltraSPARC T1 processor (codenamed "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use

2870-488: The OPENSTEP for Mach port for SPARC, Sun and NeXT developed an OpenStep compliant set of frameworks to run on Sun's Solaris operating system. After developing Solaris OpenStep, Sun lost interest in OpenStep and shifted its attention toward Java. As a virtual machine development environment, Java served as a direct competitor to OpenStep. Unlike other versions, Solaris OpenStep had Interface Builder and Project Builder sold in

2952-468: The OPENSTEP platform. Unlike the operating system as a whole, these packages were designed to run stand-alone on practically any operating system. The idea was to use OpenStep code as a basis for network-wide applications running across different platforms, as opposed to using CORBA or some other system. Primary among these packages was Portable Distributed Objects (PDO). PDO was essentially an even more "stripped down" version of OpenStep containing only

3034-572: The OpenStep specification to the industry's object standards bodies. The official OpenStep API, published in September 1994, was the first to split the API between Foundation and Application Kit and the first to use the "NS" prefix. Early versions of NeXTSTEP use an "NX" prefix and contain only the Application Kit, relying on standard Unix libc types for low-level data structures. OPENSTEP remained NeXT's primary operating system product until

3116-738: The Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers, and the Sun Java Workstation W1100z and W2100z workstations. In September 2005 Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron-based servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers. These were designed from scratch by a team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers. In July 2006, the Sun Fire X4500 and X4600 systems were introduced, extending

3198-553: The SPARC architecture. OpenStep differs from NeXTSTEP in various ways: The OpenStep API specification defines three major components: Foundation Kit, the software framework ; Application Kit , the GUI and graphics front-end; and Display PostScript, a 2D graphics system (for drawing windows and other graphics on the screen). The standardization on OpenStep also allowed for the creation of several new library packages that were delivered on

3280-544: The Sun Blade X6250 server module introduced in June 2007. In May 2008 AMD announced its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) was expanding its focus to include optimization to Sun's OpenSolaris and xVM virtualization products for AMD processors. Although Sun was initially known as a hardware company, its software history began with its founding in 1982; co-founder Bill Joy was one of the leading Unix developers of

3362-596: The aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also marketed a Network Computer (a term popularized and eventually trademarked by Oracle ); the JavaStation was a diskless system designed to run Java applications. Although none of these business initiatives were particularly successful, the Cobalt purchase gave Sun a toehold for its return to the x86 hardware market. In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system,

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3444-576: The amounts indicated when the acquisition closed. For the first decade of Sun's history, the company positioned its products as technical workstations , competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s. It then shifted its hardware product line to emphasize servers and storage. High-level telecom control systems such as Operational Support Systems service predominantly used Sun equipment. Sun originally used Motorola 68000 family central processing units for

3526-483: The company merged with Apple Computer in 1997. OPENSTEP was then combined with technologies from the existing classic Mac OS to produce Mac OS X . iPhone and iPad 's iOS is also a descendant of OPENSTEP, but targeted at touch devices. Sun originally adopted the OpenStep environment with the intent of complementing Sun's CORBA -compliant object system, Solaris NEO (formerly known as Project DOE), by providing an object-oriented user interface toolkit to complement

3608-403: The company released Solaris 10. The new version included a large number of enhancements to the operating system, as well as very novel features, previously unseen in the industry. Solaris 10 update releases continued through the next 8 years, the last release from Sun Microsystems being Solaris 10 10/09. The following updates were released by Oracle under the new license agreement; the final release

3690-418: The company's current strategy. Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram , was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt , also of Stanford. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple, and later blue. During

3772-472: The company's market value to $ 3 billion. With falling sales to large corporate clients, Sun announced plans to lay off 5,000 to 6,000 workers, or 15–18% of its work force. It expected to save $ 700 million to $ 800 million a year as a result of the moves, while also taking up to $ 600 million in charges. As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000 common shares of Sun and at $ 9.50 per share offered by Oracle, they received

3854-738: The early 1990s, Brian P. Dougherty , founder of Berkeley Softworks (which would go on to be re-incorporated as the GeoWorks Corporation ) accused the Java development team at Sun for studying GeoWorks's PC/GEOS operating system and incorporating features of PC/GEOS into their Unix-based operating system. Brian claimed that the object-oriented and flexible UI of PC/GEOS was "to this day the most sophisticated UI technology ever built into an OS". From 1992 Sun also sold Interactive Unix , an operating system it acquired when it bought Interactive Systems Corporation from Eastman Kodak Company. This

3936-402: The early 1990s, as it decided to concentrate on SPARC and retire the last Motorola systems and 386i products, a move dubbed by McNealy as "all the wood behind one arrowhead". Even so, Sun kept its hand in the x86 world, as a release of Solaris for PC compatibles began shipping in 1993. In 1997, Sun acquired Diba, Inc., followed later by the acquisition of Cobalt Networks in 2000, with

4018-417: The file formats that they generated were often quite different. In general terms, it was not always possible to write different portions of a program in different languages, although doing so often has real utility. The problem was not so acute on minicomputers and mainframes where the vendor often specified standards for their libraries, but on microcomputers the programming systems were generally delivered by

4100-441: The first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which were later launched as its first software as a service product. In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $ 19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $ 9 million on GAAP basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14, 2005. In January 2007, Sun reported

4182-431: The four-processor SPARCserver 600MP. This was followed by the 8-processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20-processor SPARCcenter 2000, which were based on work done in conjunction with Xerox PARC . In 1995 the company introduced Sun Ultra series machines that were equipped with the first 64-bit implementation of SPARC processors ( UltraSPARC ). In the late 1990s the transformation of product line in favor of large 64-bit SMP systems

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4264-660: The industry. This prompted a delay while the ORB was re-engineered for CORBA support. Under the CORBA model, different objects, like those from DOE or SOM, would be able to interact by sharing a common interface. A bigger problem for Sun is that they had no integrated desktop object programming solution. Although C++ object libraries were becoming common on some platforms, their own SunOS (later known as Solaris ) operating system and associated SunView and X window systems were 'plain C' based, while their newer NeWS windowing environment

4346-627: The introduction of the SPARC V9 architecture in 1995, which added 64-bit extensions. Sun developed several generations of SPARC-based computer systems, including the SPARCstation , Ultra , and Sun Blade series of workstations, and the SPARCserver, Netra , Enterprise , and Sun Fire line of servers. In the early 1990s the company began to extend its product line to include large-scale symmetric multiprocessing servers, starting with

4428-492: The mid-1980s with Sun's NeWS windowing system , but the combination of a complex application programming interface (API) and generally poor performance led to little real-world use and the system was eventually abandoned. Sun then began looking for other options. Taligent was considered to be a competitor in the operating system and object markets, and Microsoft's Cairo was at least a consideration, even without any product releases from either. Taligent's theoretical newness

4510-417: The mid-1990s, NeXT staff took to writing in solutions to various CORBA magazine articles in a few lines of code, whereas the original article would fill several pages. Even though using PDO required the installation of a considerable amount of supporting code (Objective-C and the libraries), PDO applications were nevertheless considerably smaller than similar CORBA solutions, typically about one-half to one-third

4592-526: The most powerful, enterprise class high-end CC-NUMA servers developed by Sun, such as the Sun Fire E15K and the Sun Fire E25K . In November 2005, Sun launched the UltraSPARC T1 , notable for its ability to concurrently run 32 threads of execution on 8 processor cores. Its intent was to drive more efficient use of CPU resources, which is of particular importance in data centers , where there

4674-632: The new UltraSPARC CPUs based on the SPARC V9 architecture. Within the next four years, the successors Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 were released in 2000 and 2002 respectively. Following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors' Linux-based systems, Sun began to include Linux as part of its strategy in 2002. Sun supported both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on its x64 systems; companies such as Canonical Ltd. , Wind River Systems and MontaVista also supported their versions of Linux on Sun's SPARC-based systems. In 2004, after having cultivated

4756-749: The object-oriented CORBA plumbing. The port involved integrating the OpenStep AppKit with the Display PostScript layer of the Sun X11 server, making the AppKit tolerant of multi-threaded code (as Project DOE was inherently heavily multi-threaded), implementing a Solaris daemon to simulate the behavior of Mach ports, extending the SunPro C++ compiler to support Objective-C using NeXT's ObjC runtime, writing an X11 window manager to implement

4838-464: The only computers other than DEC 's VAX to run 4.2BSD . It licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus -based systems running Unix from UniSoft . Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW , for Sun Workstations (later Sun Worldwide ). The symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA ; Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented

4920-462: The original NeXTSTEP. Workstations from Sun Microsystems were originally programmed at a relatively low-level making calls directly to the underlying Unix operating system and the SunView window system toolkit, and to libraries built atop those interfaces. This led to complex programming even for simple projects. An attempt to address this with an object oriented programming model was made in

5002-600: The process of switching. Never a clean match from the UI perspective, probably due to OPENSTEP's routing of window graphics through the Display Postscript server—which was also ported to Windows—OSE nevertheless managed to work fairly well and extended OpenStep's commercial lifespan. OPENSTEP and OSE had two revisions (and one major one that was never released) before NeXT was purchased by Apple in 1997. After acquiring NeXT, Apple intended to ship Rhapsody as

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5084-461: The products were later split, and NEO was released in late 1995 without the OpenStep environment. In March 1996, Sun announced Joe, a product to integrate NEO with Java . Sun shipped a beta release of the OpenStep environment for Solaris on July 22, 1996, and made it freely available for download in August 1996 for non-commercial use, and for sale in September 1996. OpenStep/Solaris was shipped only for

5166-518: The project. By the time DOE, now known as NEO, was released in 1995, Sun had already moved on to Java as their next big thing. Java was now the GUI of choice for client-side applications, and Sun's OpenStep plans were quietly dropped (see Lighthouse Design ). NEO was re-positioned as a Java system with the introduction of the "Joe" framework, but it saw little use. Components of NEO and Joe were eventually subsumed into Enterprise JavaBeans . Although distributed objects, and CORBA in particular, were

5248-530: The race is far from over. ... [In 1996,] Cairo will be very close behind, and Taligent will be very far behind." Sun's CEO Scott McNealy said, "We have no insurance policy. We have made a firm one-company, one-architecture decision, not like Taligent getting a trophy spouse by signing up HP." The first draft of the API was published by NeXT in mid 1994. Later that year they released an OpenStep compliant version of NeXTSTEP as OPENSTEP, supported on several of their platforms as well as Sun SPARC systems. NeXT submitted

5330-486: The size. The similar D'OLE provided the same types of services, but presented the resulting objects as COM objects, with the goal of allowing programmers to create COM services running on high-powered platforms, called from Microsoft Windows applications. For instance one could develop a high-powered financial modeling application using D'OLE, and then call it directly from within Microsoft Excel . When D'OLE

5412-402: The stock fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $ 100. It continued to fall, faster than many other technology companies. A year later, it had reached below $ 10 (a tenth of what it was in 1990), but it eventually bounced back to $ 20. In mid-2004, Sun closed their Newark, California , factory and consolidated all manufacturing to Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland. In 2006, the rest of

5494-547: The time the company was acquired by Oracle Corporation , it had outsourced most manufacturing responsibilities. On April 20, 2009, it was announced that Oracle would acquire Sun for US$ 7.4 billion. The deal was completed on January 27, 2010. The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation , the Sun-1 , was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto , California. Bechtolsheim originally designed

5576-543: The time there were a number of major projects to deliver such a system, including IBM 's System Object Model (SOM/DSOM), NeXT 's Portable Distributed Objects , Microsoft 's Component Object Model (COM/DCOM) and many CORBA flavors. Sun, attempting to position itself as the future IBM in terms of backoffice support, felt they had to attack this market as well. Sun's solution was based on work in their Spring operating system, which used intercommunicating objects for almost all programming tasks. Modifying this to work under

5658-736: The time, having contributed the vi editor, the C shell , and significant work developing TCP/IP and the BSD Unix OS. Sun later developed software such as the Java programming language and acquired software such as StarOffice , VirtualBox and MySQL . In February 1991, the company established SunSoft, Inc., a wholly owned division of Sun dedicated to the development of operating systems and application software. Sun used community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies. GNOME -based desktop software called Java Desktop System (originally code-named "Madhatter")

5740-487: The way of this sort of solution was the massive differences in operating systems and programming languages between platforms. While it might be possible to build such a system that would work on any one combination of workstation and server, the same solution would not work on any other system. Oddly, the differences between any two programming languages on a single platform was almost as great. Each language had its own format for passing parameters into procedure calls ,

5822-680: Was NeXTSTEP , a sophisticated Mach-UNIX based operating system that originally ran only on NeXT's Motorola 68k -based workstations and that was then ported to run on 32-bit Intel x86 -based "IBM-compatible" personal computers , PA-RISC -based workstations from Hewlett-Packard , and SPARC -based workstations from Sun Microsystems . NeXT completed an implementation of OpenStep on their existing Mach-based OS and called it OPENSTEP for Mach 4.0 (July, 1996), 4.1 (December, 1996), and 4.2 (January, 1997). It was, for all intents, NeXTSTEP 4.0, and still retained flagship NeXTSTEP technologies (such as DPS , UNIX underpinnings, user interface characteristics like

5904-519: Was a popular Unix variant for the PC platform and a major competitor to market leader SCO UNIX . Sun's focus on Interactive Unix diminished in favor of Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems; it was dropped as a product in 2001. Sun dropped the Solaris 2.x version numbering scheme after the Solaris 2.6 release (1997); the following version was branded Solaris 7. This was the first 64-bit release, intended for

5986-578: Was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics. Their 32-bit, 64-processor Cray Superserver 6400 , related to the SPARCcenter, led to the 64-bit Sun Enterprise 10000 high-end server (otherwise known as Starfire or E10K). In September 2004, Sun made available systems with UltraSPARC IV which was the first multi-core SPARC processor. It was followed by UltraSPARC IV+ in September 2005 and its revisions with higher clock speeds in 2007. These CPUs were used in

6068-400: Was based on a network-extensible object oriented dialect of PostScript . In order to supply a comprehensive and flexible object programming solution, Sun turned to NeXT and the two developed OpenStep . The idea was to have OpenStep programs calling DOE objects on Sun servers, providing a backoffice-to-frontoffice solution on Sun machines. OpenStep was not released until 1993, further delaying

6150-523: Was distributed for the Solaris operating system, and at one point for Linux. Sun supported its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It released the source code for Solaris under the open-source Common Development and Distribution License , via the OpenSolaris community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. It offers support services on

6232-427: Was first released, OLE by itself only communicated between applications running on a single machine. PDO enabled NeXT to demonstrate Excel talking to other Microsoft applications across a network before Microsoft themselves were able to implement this functionality (DCOM). Another package developed on OpenStep was Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF), a object-relational mapping product. NeXT's first operating system

6314-581: Was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun 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 on its 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

6396-419: Was not at all even. For instance, SQL required the workstation to download huge data sets and then process them locally, whereas use of terminal emulators left all of the work to the server and provided no GUI . It seemed that the proper split of duties would be to have a cooperative set of objects, the workstation being responsible for display and user interaction, with processing on the server. Standing in

6478-514: Was often compared to NeXT's older but mature and commercially established platform. Sun held exploratory meetings with Taligent before deciding upon building out its object application framework OpenStep in partnership with NeXT as a "preemptive move against Taligent and Cairo". Bud Tribble , a founding designer of the Macintosh and of NeXTStep, was now SunSoft's Vice President of Object Products to lead this decision. The 1993 partnership included

6560-407: Was sold for only a short period before being dropped (along with OpenStep) in 1996. In its place is what is today known as Enterprise JavaBeans . In the early 1990s the 'next big thing' in computing was to use desktop microcomputers to display and edit data being provided by mainframes and minicomputers . Although a number of methods for this sort of access already existed, the division of labor

6642-492: Was the first commercial release of this operating system, and was delivered exclusively for PowerPC Mac hardware. After replacing the Display Postscript WindowServer with Quartz , and responding to developers by including better backward compatibility for classic Mac OS applications through the addition of Carbon , Apple released Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server , starting at version 10.0; Mac OS X

6724-542: Was to strip away those portions of NeXTSTEP that depended on Mach or NeXT-specific hardware being present. This resulted in a smaller system that consisted primarily of Display PostScript , the Objective-C runtime and compilers, and the majority of the NeXTSTEP Objective-C libraries. Not included was the basic operating system, or the lower-level display system. Steve Jobs said "We are ahead today, but

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