At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

[3][4] Other notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox.

[5] 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.

[6] He built the first examples from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.

[7] On February 24, 1982, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems.

The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple, and later blue.

[18] Sales in Sun's important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop and auctioned high-end servers.

[23] In 2004, Sun canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high instruction-level parallelism and operating frequency.

[25] Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, Prague, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Canberra and Trondheim.

With falling sales to large corporate clients, Sun announced plans to lay off 5,000 to 6,000 workers, or 15–18% of its work force.

In the early 1990s the company began to extend its product line to include large-scale symmetric multiprocessing servers, starting with the four-processor SPARCserver 600MP.

In November 2005, Sun launched the UltraSPARC T1, notable for its ability to concurrently run 32 threads of execution on 8 processor cores.

Its intent was to drive more efficient use of CPU resources, which is of particular importance in data centers, where there is an increasing need to reduce power and air conditioning demands, much of which comes from the heat generated by CPUs.

In the late 1980s, Sun also marketed an Intel 80386–based machine, the Sun386i; this was designed to be a hybrid system, running SunOS but at the same time supporting DOS applications.

Sun also marketed a Network Computer (a term popularized and eventually trademarked by Oracle); the JavaStation was a diskless system designed to run Java applications.

[77] These were designed from scratch by a team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers.

In February 1991, the company established SunSoft, Inc., a wholly owned division of Sun dedicated to the development of operating systems and application software.

A 2006 report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT stated that Sun was the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world.

Following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors' Linux-based systems, Sun began to include Linux as part of its strategy in 2002.

In 2004, after having cultivated a reputation as one of Microsoft's most vocal antagonists, Sun entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving US$1.95 billion in settlement payments from them.

The Java platform was developed at Sun by James Gosling in the early 1990s with the objective of allowing programs to function regardless of the device they were used on, sparking the slogan "Write once, run anywhere" (WORA).

[90] In February 2009, Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet.

Desktop environments and applications could be hosted in a datacenter, with users accessing these environments from a wide range of client devices, including Microsoft Windows PCs, Sun Ray virtual display clients, Apple Macintoshes, PDAs or any combination of supported devices.

Sun's middleware product was branded as the Java Enterprise System (or JES), and marketed for web and application serving, communication, calendaring, directory, identity management and service-oriented architecture.

On June 2, 2005, Sun announced it would purchase Storage Technology Corporation (StorageTek) for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share, a deal completed in August 2005.

[100] Notable Sun employees included John Gilmore, Whitfield Diffie, Radia Perlman, Ivan Sutherland, Marc Tremblay, and Satya Nadella.

Jonathan I. Schwartz was one of the first CEOs of large companies to regularly blog; his postings were frequently quoted and analyzed in the press.

[108] In October, Sun announced a second round of thousands of employees to be laid off, blamed partially on delays in approval of the merger.

[5] In January 2011, Oracle agreed to pay $46 million to settle charges that it submitted false claims to US federal government agencies and paid "kickbacks" to systems integrators.

[110] In February 2011, Sun's former Menlo Park, California, campus of about 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) was sold, and it was announced that it would become headquarters for Facebook.