[Recorded Jan 11, 2006]
Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla, with moderator John Gage share their personal stories of the early days at Sun. 

When Xerox PARC loaned the Stanford Engineering Department an entire Alto Ethernet network with a laser printer, then-graduate student Andy Bechtolsheim redesigned it into a prototype and attached it to Stanford Universitys computer network. Sun Microsystems grew out of this prototype, and the companys name came from the acronym for Stanford University Network (SUN). 

The company was incorporated in 1982 by three 26-year-old Stanford 
alumni: Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy. The trio soon attracted UC Berkeley UNIX guru, Bill Joy, who led software development for the new company. By its second birthday, Sun had grown to more than 400 employees. Most recently, Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle.