Sun Microsystems: Bechtolsheim, Joy, and the networking decade

What this is

Vinod Khosla, then a Stanford GSB student, was founding chief executive and hired Scott McNealy early. His chief contribution, by Jonathan Hare's account, was persuading Andy Bechtolsheim to join as a co-founder rather than merely licensing his workstation design — the differentiator that let Sun leapfrog DEC's VAX, HP's minicomputers and IBM's in the scientific and technical market.

Bill Joy handled the operating system, converting BSD Unix into Sun's. The tagline is generally attributed to John Gage. Hare met Bechtolsheim, Eric Schmidt and most of the senior leadership while at Consilient.

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.

• Correction of the lineage as recorded