List of Sun Microsystems employees

Sun Microsystems, from its inception in 1982 to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2010, became known for being "something of a farm system for Silicon Valley."^[1] It had a number of employees credited with notable achievements before, during or after their tenure there.

A

Brian Aker, MySQL Director of Technology
Ken Arnold, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, co-author of The Java Programming Language

B

Carol Bartz, head of SunFed, Sun service and worldwide operations; Autodesk CEO, Yahoo! CEO
Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun co-founder, systems designer and Silicon Valley investor
Joshua Bloch, author of Effective Java
Jon Bosak, chair of the original XML working group
Jeff Bonwick, slab-allocator, vmem and ZFS
Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell
Tim Bray, Sun Director of Web Technologies
David J. Brown, SUN workstation at Stanford; Solaris at Sun
Paul Buchheit, engineer at Sun from May 1997 to August 1997; Creator of Gmail

C

Bryan Cantrill, of 2005 Technology Review "Top 35 Young Innovators", co-inventor of DTrace
Alfred Chuang, co-founder of BEA Systems
Danny Cohen, co-creator of Cohen-Sutherland line clipping algorithms; coined the computer terms "Big Endians" and "Little Endians" (Endianness)
Bill Coleman, co-founder of BEA Systems
Danese Cooper, open source specialist

D

James Duncan Davidson, creator of the Tomcat web container and the Ant build tool
L. Peter Deutsch, founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript
Whitfield Diffie, Chief Security Officer, co-inventor of public-key cryptography
Robert Drost, one of Technology Review's 2004 "Top 100 Young Innovators"

F

Dan Farmer, computer security researcher
Marc Fleury, creator of the JBoss application server
Ned Freed, email systems researcher, co-author of several MIME RFCs

G

Richard P. Gabriel, Lisp expert and founder of Lucid, Inc.
John Gage, Chief Researcher and former Science Officer; first Sun salesman
John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cygnus Solutions
Gary Ginstling, music industry executive^[2]^[3]
James Gosling, co-inventor of Java; creator of NeWS 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
Bill Joy, Sun co-founder and architect of BSD Unix; author of the vi text editor

K

Vinod Khosla, Sun co-founder and Silicon Valley investor

L

Susan Landau, mathematician and cybersecurity expert
Adam Leventhal, co-inventor of DTrace
Peter van der Linden, former manager of kernel group, author of numerous Java and C books

M

Chris Malachowsky, co-founder of NVIDIA
Clark Masters EVP, Enterprise Systems and Father of the E10K, President of SunFed
Craig McClanahan, creator or the Apache Struts framework and architect of Tomcat's servlet container, Catalina
Scott McNealy, co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Sun; CEO from 1984-2006
Larry McVoy, CEO of BitMover
Björn Michaelsen, Director at The Document Foundation
Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB from 2001 until Sun acquisition in 2008
Jim Mitchell, Vice President and Sun Fellow
Ian Murdock, Vice President of Developer and Community Marketing, founder of Debian

N

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
Patrick Naughton, co-creator of Java
Jakob Nielsen, web-design usability authority
Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google

O

John Ousterhout, inventor of the Tcl scripting language

P

Greg Papadopoulos, Executive Vice President and CTO
Radia Perlman, sometimes known as the "Mother of the Internet"
Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer
Kim Polese, prominent dot-com era executive
Curtis Priem, co-founder of NVIDIA

R

George Reyes, former CFO of Google, Inc.
David S. H. Rosenthal, early X Window System developer and original designer of the ICCCM
Wayne Rosing, project lead for the Apple Lisa; Sun hardware development manager and manager of Sun Labs

S

Bob Scheifler, leader of X Window System development from 1984 to 1996
Eric Schmidt, former Sun Chief Technology Officer, chairman and former CEO of Google, Inc., and co-developer of lex
Jonathan I. Schwartz, former Sun President and CEO
Ed Scott, co-founder of BEA Systems
Mike Shapiro, co-inventor of DTrace
Bob Sproull, computer graphics pioneer
Guy L. Steele, Jr., co-inventor of the Scheme programming language and member of IEEE standards committees of many programming languages
Bert Sutherland, manager of Sun Labs, Xerox PARC, BBN Computer Science Division
Ivan Sutherland, computer graphics pioneer

T

Bruce Tognazzini, computer usability consultant
Marc Tremblay, microprocessor architect and Sun's employee with the most awarded patents
Bud Tribble, former VP of software development at NeXT, VP of software technology at Apple

W

Jim Waldo, lead architect of Jini
Michael Widenius, original author of MySQL

Y

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

Z

Ed Zander, former president of Sun Microsystems; former CEO of Motorola

References

^ "Sun Microsystems". Kleiner Perkins. Retrieved 2024-07-26.
^ "Gary Ginstling: Executive Director National Symphony Orchestra". The Kennedy Center. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
^ Lindquist, David (June 5, 2017). "Symphony CEO Gary Ginstling will lead National Symphony Orchestra". IndyStar. Retrieved 8 February 2023.

[1] "Sun Microsystems". Kleiner Perkins. Retrieved 2024-07-26.

[kcbio-2] "Gary Ginstling: Executive Director National Symphony Orchestra". The Kennedy Center. Retrieved 8 February 2023.

[Lindquist-3] Lindquist, David (June 5, 2017). "Symphony CEO Gary Ginstling will lead National Symphony Orchestra". IndyStar. Retrieved 8 February 2023.

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[2]

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