Sun Microsystems grew out of Stanford in 1982 — its name came from the Stanford University Network — and rode the rise of Unix workstations to become a defining company of the client-server era. Its motto, "The network is the computer," sounded like marketing at the time and reads now like a prediction of cloud computing.
What it built
Sun's engineering influence was outsized. It designed its own SPARC processors and the Solaris operating system, created NFS (still the model for network file systems), and gave the world Java in 1995 — a language and runtime whose "write once, run anywhere" promise made it the backbone of enterprise software and, later, Android. Sun also seeded open-source cornerstones including MySQL and OpenOffice.
Decline and acquisition
The dot-com bust hit Sun hard: it had sold the expensive servers that powered the bubble, and demand collapsed when the bubble did. Commodity Linux-on-x86 servers then ate its high-margin market from below. After years of losses, Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010. The Sun name faded, but its legacy did not — Java and its ideas about networked computing remain everywhere.