He was one of a small group at Stanford University that helped to develop the computer system that later became the foundational technology of Sun Microsystems, and was a co-founder of Silicon Graphics.
[1] In 1984, Brown was introduced to David Wheeler, who invited him to join the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory as a doctoral candidate.
[4][5] Brown and Stephen R. Bourne formed the Workstation Systems Engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation.
[3][7] Later, Brown worked on Solaris's adoption of open-source software and practices, and then its technologies for energy-efficient computing.
[6][8] In 1998, Brown was elected to the Council of the Association for Computing Machinery,[9] and in 2003 became a founding editor of the ACM Queue magazine, producing several articles through 2010.