Sun Microsystems, every mention

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every year anyone David Rosenthal 21Ben Gilbert 5Brendan Eich 4Steve Ballmer 1

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Sun Microsystems comes up

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Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired Aug 10, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 2:12:47 Ben Gilbert They were on this Sun Microsystems hardware that was state of the art at the time, and they had a 117 of them clustered together to create a render farm for the film.

Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired Jun 30, 2025 · 5 mentions

  • ▶ 30:36 David Rosenthal They end up getting a meeting with Vinod Khosla, a legendary founder of Sun Microsystems.
  • ▶ 40:50 David Rosenthal So Larry and Sergey go to a professor in the CS department at Stanford named Dave Cheridan, and Dave had started an Ethernet company called Granite Systems with Andy Bechtelsheim from Sun, while also staying as a professor at Stanford at…
  • ▶ 1:00:10 David Rosenthal The primary Java virtual machine that Sun used as, like, the official Java virtual machine.
  • ▶ 1:08:51 David Rosenthal The ink to me cage had all these gleaming sun machines and lots of space and lots of airflow and all this incredible cable management.
  • ▶ 1:43:44 David Rosenthal Through all of it, you know, 1617, 18 months in, finally, Eric Schmidt emerges as probably the only viable candidate out there, and I think Eric was acceptable to both sides, both because he was an actual engineer and had been at Sun, he…

The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired Jun 2, 2025 · 1 mention

Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired Jul 22, 2024 · 5 mentions

Benchmark Part I · Acquired Sep 28, 2022 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 9:54 David Rosenthal He did Sun, which wasn't the PC wave, but it was in that era.
  • ▶ 1:31:33 Ben Gilbert And then there were times where it wasn't growing at all because the servers were down and they had to work directly with, I feel like it was like, I don't know if it was deck or sun, but someone to like come help us fix whatever we're…

Amazon.com · Acquired Aug 16, 2022 · 1 mention

The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired Jun 20, 2022 · 2 mentions

Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired Mar 28, 2022 · 10 mentions

  • ▶ 19:36 David Rosenthal Sun Microsystems was one of their biggest customers, and that was how Sun got started and made the chips for their workstations.
  • ▶ 19:46 David Rosenthal Jensen, when he shows up at LSI, Sun is like just starting and coming to LSI, and so he gets put on the project.
  • ▶ 19:53 David Rosenthal He basically embeds with Sun, like in the early days of Sun Microsystems, to help them build out the chips for what would ultimately become the Spark Station One, Sun's first big workstation product.
  • ▶ 20:07 David Rosenthal Over the next few years, he pretty much exclusively works with Sun while he's at LSI Logic,
  • ▶ 20:12 David Rosenthal He works directly with Andy Bechtelstein, who, you know, the founder of Sun, and with Bino Khosla.
  • ▶ 20:18 David Rosenthal He becomes super well-known and develops quite a reputation there as somebody who can really, like, take these visions for chips and these customer requirements from Sun and turn it into, you know, reality and production.
  • ▶ 20:47 David Rosenthal Two of Jensen's buddies, who he's become close with at Sun, Chris Malachowski and Curtis Prem, who in Jensen's own words, he describes them as really, really fantastic engineers, and when Jensen says that, he means it.
  • ▶ 21:03 David Rosenthal They come to Jensen and they're like, we're not like super happy at Sun, the two of us.
  • ▶ 21:46 David Rosenthal And you know, remember this is the era of Sun, Alice A Logic, all this stuff.
  • ▶ 27:12 David Rosenthal He's gonna go start this company with two engineers from Sun, and, uh, this is what the business plan is gonna be.

The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired Feb 15, 2022 · 4 mentions

  • ▶ 13:51 Brendan Eich I interviewed at Sun.
  • ▶ 14:02 Brendan Eich He was like director of software at the time at Sun.
  • ▶ 17:53 Brendan Eich Um, the LDAP team from University of Michigan, Tim Howes and company, the Kiva app server, a bunch of Java investments, even started building a Java jitting runtime to rival Hotspot, which Sun had bought Anamorphic to build.
  • ▶ 18:14 Brendan Eich But Netscape couldn't pull it off, and Sun was going to win with Hotspot.
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