Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) is an American vendor of computers, computer components, software, and information-technology services, founded in 1982 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.

Sun's products include computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC and AMD's Opteron processors, the Solaris operating system, the NFS network file system, and the Java platform.

Sun Microsystems is headquartered in Santa Clara, California on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center, which was an asylum from 1888 to 1972.

Brief history

The initial design for Sun's UNIX workstation was conceived when the founders were graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The company name SUN originally stood for Stanford University Network (which is reflected in the company's stock symbol, SUNW, which now stands for Sun Worldwide). The company was incorporated in 1982 and went public in 1986. Its founders were Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy (a primary developer of BSD Unix), and Andy Bechtolsheim; McNealy and Bechtolsheim remain at Sun. Other Sun luminaries include early employees John Gilmore and James Gosling. Sun was an early advocate of Unix-based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially NFS, as reflected in the company's motto "The Network Is The Computer". James Gosling led the team which developed the Java programming language. Most recently, Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at W3C.

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.