List of people who worked at Sun Microsystems at some point prior to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation.

A

Brian Aker Brian Aker, born August 4, 1972 in Lexington, Kentucky, US, is an open-source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database. Aker was Director of Architecture at MySQL A ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

Director of Technology *

Ken Arnold Kenneth Cutts Richard Cabot Arnold (born 1958) is an American computer programmer well known as one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling video game ''Rogue'', for his contributions to the original Berkeley ( BSD) distribution of Uni ...

, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, co-author of "The Java Programming Language".

B

* Todd Basche, creator of th
SUN Portable SPARCstation

& inventor of

Wordlock Wordlock is a brand of combination locks, made by Wordlock, Inc., that differs from traditional combination locks in that it has letters on its dials instead of numbers. This allows the combination to be a four-letter or five-letter word or name ...

Carol Bartz Carol Ann Bartz (born August 28, 1948) is an American business executive, former president and CEO of the internet services company Yahoo!, and former chairman, president, and CEO at architectural and engineering design software company Autodesk. ...

, head of SunFed, Sun service and worldwide operations;

Autodesk Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartere ...

CEO,

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

CEO * Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun co-founder, systems designer and Silicon Valley investor *

Joshua Bloch Joshua J. Bloch (born August 28, 1961) is an American software engineer and a technology author, formerly employed at Sun Microsystems and Google. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the Java Collect ...

, author of ''Effective Java'' *

Jon Bosak Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at the W3C. From 1996–2008, he worked for Sun Microsystems. XML Tim Bray, who was one of the editors of the XML specification, has this to say in his note on Bosak in his annotated version o ...

, chair of the original

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

working group * Jeff Bonwick, slab-allocator, vmem and

ZFS ZFS (previously: Zettabyte File System) is a file system with volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an ope ...

* Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell *

Tim Bray Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 w ...

, Director of Web Technologies * David J. Brown,

SUN workstation The SUN workstation was a modular computer system designed at Stanford University in the early 1980s. It became the seed technology for many commercial products, including the original workstations from Sun Microsystems. History In 1979 Xerox do ...

and Solaris *

Paul Buchheit Paul T. Buchheit is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur who created Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested Google's former company motto ''Don't be evil'' in a 2000 ...

, engineer at Sun from May 1997 to August 1997; Creator of

Gmail Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...

C

* Bryan Cantrill, of 2005 ''

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

'' "Top 35 Young Innovators", co-inventor of DTrace. *

Alfred Chuang Alfred S. Chuang () is an American business technology executive and venture capitalist. He is the former CEO of BEA Systems. In 2020, he founded Race Capital, a venture fund. Early life and education A native of Hong Kong, Chuang graduated fr ...

, co-founder of

BEA Systems BEA Systems, Inc. was a company that specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products which was wholly acquired by Oracle Corporation on April 29, 2008. History BEA began as a software company, founded in 1995 and headquartered in ...

* Danny Cohen, co-creator of Cohen-Sutherland line clipping algorithms, coined the computer terms "Big Endians" and "Little Endians" (

Endianness In computing, endianness, also known as byte sex, is the order or sequence of bytes of a word of digital data in computer memory. Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian (BE) or little-endian (LE). A big-endian system stores the mos ...

) * Danese Cooper, Open Source specialist

D

* James Duncan Davidson, creator of the

Tomcat Tomcat may refer to: Animals * A sexually mature male cat * Paederus, known as in Indonesia Science and technology * Apache Tomcat, an implementation of Java web-server technologies * Beretta 3032 Tomcat, a pistol * Grumman F-14 Tomcat, a f ...

web container and the

Ant Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from vespoid wasp ancestors in the Cretaceous period. More than 13,800 of an estimated total of ...

build tool *

L. Peter Deutsch L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and Portable Document Format, PDF interpreter. Deutsch's othe ...

, founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language file ...

Whitfield Diffie Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie (born June 5, 1944), ForMemRS, is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper ''New Dir ...

, Chief Security Officer, co-inventor of

public-key cryptography Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

* Robert Drost, one of ''

s 2004 "Top 100 Young Innovators"

F

* Dan Farmer, computer security researcher *

Marc Fleury Marc Fleury (born 1968) is the creator of JBoss, an open-source Java application server. Fleury was born in Paris. He holds a degree in mathematics and a doctorate in physics from the École Polytechnique in Paris and a Master in Theoretical ...

, creator of the

JBoss WildFly, formerly known as JBoss AS, or simply JBoss, is an application server written by JBoss, now developed by Red Hat. WildFly is written in Java and implements the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specification. It runs on mul ...

application server * Ned Freed, email systems researcher, co-author of several

MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message ...

RFCs

G

* Richard P. Gabriel, Lisp expert and founder of Lucid, Inc. *

John Gage John Burdette Gage (born October 9, 1942) was the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems, where he is credited with creating the phrase The Network is the Computer. He served as vice president and chief researcher and director of the Science Office ...

, Chief Researcher and former Science Officer; first Sun salesman *

John Gilmore John Gilmore may refer to: * John Gilmore (activist) (born 1955), co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cygnus Solutions * John Gilmore (musician) (1931–1995), American jazz saxophonist * John Gilmore (representative) (1780–1845 ...

, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and

Cygnus Solutions Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: ''Making free software affordable''. For years, employ ...

* Gary Ginstling, music industry executive *

James Gosling James Gosling (born May 19, 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language. Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for the conception ...

, co-inventor of

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

; creator of

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. N ...

networked extensible window system; author of the first (proprietary) Unix implementation of the Emacs text editor * Todd Greanier, software architect, author and instructor * Brendan Gregg, author of ''DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD'', ''Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud''

J

* Kim Jones, Vice President of Global Education, Government and Health Sciences; CEO of Sun UK from 2007; CEO of

Curriki Curriki is an online, free, open education service. Curriki is structured as a nonprofit organization to provide open educational resources primarily in support of K-12 education. Curricula and instructional materials are available at the Curriki ...

Bill Joy William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at ...

, Sun co-founder and architect of BSD Unix; author of the vi text editor

K

Vinod Khosla Vinod Khosla (born 28 January 1955) is an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas suc ...

, Sun co-founder and

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Coun ...

investor

L

* Susan Landau, mathematician and cybersecurity expert * Adam Leventhal, co-inventor of DTrace *

Peter van der Linden Peter van der Linden (born 1963) is an American technologist and author.Curriculum vitae

, former manager of kernel group, author of numerous Java and C books

M

Chris Malachowsky Chris Malachowsky (born May 2, 1959) is an American electrical engineer, one of the co-founders of computer graphics company Nvidia. Raised in the Oakhurst section of Ocean Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey, Malachowsky graduated from Ocean ...

, co-founder of

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

* Clark Masters EVP, Enterprise Systems and Father of the E10K, President of SunFed * Craig McClanahan, creator or the Apache Struts framework and architect of

's servlet container,

Catalina Catalina may refer to: Arts and media * ''The Catalina'', a 2012 American reality television show * ''Catalina'' (novel), a 1948 novel by W. Somerset Maugham * Catalina (''My Name Is Earl''), character from the NBC sitcom ''My Name Is Earl'' ...

Scott McNealy Scott McNealy (born November 13, 1954) is an American businessman. He is most famous for co-founding the computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim. In 2004, while still at Sun, ...

, co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Sun; CEO from 1984-2006 *

Larry McVoy Larry McVoy (born 1962 in Concord, Massachusetts, United States) is the CEO of BitMover, the company that makes BitKeeper, a version control system that was used from February 2002 to early 2005 to manage the source code of the Linux kernel. ...

, CEO of

BitMover BitKeeper is a software tool for distributed revision control of computer source code. Originally developed as proprietary software by BitMover Inc., a privately held company based in Los Gatos, California, it was released as open-source software ...

* Björn Michaelsen, Director at

The Document Foundation The Document Foundation (TDF) is a non-profit organization that promotes open-source document handling software. It was created by members of the OpenOffice.org community to manage and develop LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite, a ...

Mårten Mickos Mårten Gustaf Mickos (born November 6, 1962 in Espoo, Finland) is a technology executive based in San Francisco. He is the current CEO of HackerOne, a security vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform. Mickos was chief executive off ...

, CEO of

MySQL AB MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well as ...

from 2001 until Sun acquisition in 2008 * Jim Mitchell, Vice President and Sun Fellow *

Ian Murdock Ian Ashley Murdock (April28, 1973 – December 28, 2015) was an American software engineer, known for being the founder of the Debian project and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company. Life and career Although Murdock's parents we ...

, Vice President of Developer and Community Marketing, founder of Debian

N

* Satya Nadella, CEO of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

* Patrick Naughton, co-creator of

Jakob Nielsen Jacob or Jakob Nielsen may refer to: * Jacob Nielsen, Count of Halland (died c. 1309), great grandson of Valdemar II of Denmark * , Norway (1768-1822) * Jakob Nielsen (mathematician) (1890–1959), Danish mathematician known for work on automorphi ...

, web-design usability authority *

Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born December 14, 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is t ...

, Director of Research

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

O

John Ousterhout John Kenneth Ousterhout (, born October 15, 1954) is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout was a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley ...

, inventor of the

Tcl TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to: Business * TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company **TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology * Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league * Trade Centre Limited ...

scripting language

P

Greg Papadopoulos Gregory Michael Papadopoulos (born 1958) is an American engineer, computer scientist, executive, and venture capitalist. He is the creator and lead proponent for Redshift, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by Moore's ...

, Executive Vice President and CTO *

Radia Perlman Radia Joy Perlman (; born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her inventi ...

, sometimes known as the "Mother of the Internet" * Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer * Kim Polese, prominent dot-com era executive *

Curtis Priem Curtis R. Priem is an American computer scientist. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1982. He designed the first graphics processor for the PC, the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter. F ...

, co-founder of

R

* George Reyes, former CFO of

, Inc. *

David S. H. Rosenthal David Stuart Holmes Rosenthal (born 1948 in Cambridge, United Kingdom) is a British-American computer scientist. Biography Rosenthal is the son of Michael David Holmes Rosenthal and Marjorie Mary "Molly" Rosenthal (both deceased). His brother M ...

, early

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

developer and original designer of the

ICCCM In computing, the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM or I39L short for "I", 39 letters and "L")Wayne Rosing Wayne Rosing (born 1946) is an American engineering manager. Rosing was an engineering manager at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Data General in the 1970s. He became a director of engineering at Apple Computer in 1980. There he led the ...

, project lead for the Apple Lisa; Sun hardware development manager and manager of Sun Labs

S

Bob Scheifler Robert William Scheifler (born June 24, 1954) is an American computer scientist. He was born in Kirkwood, Missouri. He is most notable for leading the development of the X Window System from the project's inception in 1984 until the closure of t ...

, leader of

development from 1984 to 1996 * Eric Schmidt, former Sun Chief Technology Officer, chairman and former CEO of

, Inc., and co-developer of

lex Lex or LEX may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Lex'', a daily featured column in the ''Financial Times'' Games * Lex, the mascot of the word-forming puzzle video game ''Bookworm'' * Lex, the protagonist of the word-forming puzzle video ga ...

* Jonathan I. Schwartz, former President and CEO of Sun * Mike Shapiro, co-inventor of DTrace *

Bob Sproull Robert Fletcher "Bob" Sproull (born c. 1945) is an American computer scientist, who worked for Oracle Corporation where he was director of Oracle Labs in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is currently an adjunct professor at the College of Informa ...

, computer graphics pioneer *

Guy L. Steele, Jr. Guy Lewis Steele Jr. (; born October 2, 1954) is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards. Biography Steele was born in Missouri ...

, co-inventor of the

Scheme programming language Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, via a series of memos now known as the Lambda Papers. It ...

and member of IEEE standards committees of many programming languages *

Bert Sutherland William Robert Sutherland (May 10, 1936 – February 18, 2020) was an American computer scientist who was the longtime manager of three prominent research laboratories, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories (1992–1998), the Systems Sci ...

, manager of Sun Labs,

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

, BBN Computer Science Division * Ivan Sutherland, computer graphics pioneer

T

Bruce Tognazzini Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini (born 1945) is an American usability consultant and designer. He is a partner in the Nielsen Norman Group, which specializes in human-computer interaction. He was with Apple Computer for fourteen years, then with Sun ...

, computer usability consultant *

Marc Tremblay Marc Tremblay is a distinguished engineer at Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft in April 2009, he was senior vice president and chief technology officer of the microelectronics business unit at Sun Microsystems. He was instrumental in the de ...

, microprocessor architect and Sun's employee with the most awarded patents *

Bud Tribble Guy L. "Bud" Tribble is Vice President of Software Technology at Apple Inc. Work Tribble was a member of the original Apple Macintosh design team. He served as manager of the software development team, and helped to design the classic Mac OS and ...

, former VP of software development at

NeXT Next may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

, current VP of software technology at Apple

W

* Jim Waldo, lead architect of

Jini Jini (), also called Apache River, is a network architecture for the construction of distributed systems in the form of modular co-operating services. JavaSpaces is a part of the Jini. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems, Jini was released ...

Michael Widenius Ulf Michael Widenius (often called Monty; born 3 March 1962, in Helsinki, Finland) is the main author of the original version of the open source MySQL database, a founding member of the MySQL AB company and CTO of the MariaDB Corporation AB. ...

, original author of

Y

* William Yeager, software architect, inventor of the multi-protocol router.

Z

* Edward Zander, former President of Sun Microsystems; former CEO of

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sun Microsystems employees Lists of people by company Computing-related lists Employees San Francisco Bay Area-related lists Employees by company