HISTORY OF SOLARIS OS

BACKGROUND ON SUN MICROSYSTEMS, THE FOUNDER OF SOLARIS OS

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) is a multinational vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Products include computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC processors as well as AMD's Opteron and Intel's Xeon processors; storage systems; and, a suite of software products including the Solaris Operating System, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Other technologies of note include the Java platform, MySQL and NFS.

Sun is a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, and a major contributor to open source software.

On April 20, 2009, Sun and Oracle Corporation announced that they entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun for $7.4 billion. Sun shareholders approved the acquisition on July 16, 2009, but the deal is still awaiting regulatory approval, with no date yet given for its completion.

Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon, USA and Linlithgow, Scotland.


HISTORY:
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. He originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed as a 3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. 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.[8] He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.

On February 12, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of BSD, joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network. Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.

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 the company's current strategy.

Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner.



Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystem