An
airhacks.fm conversation with Scott McNealy (
@scottmcnealy), co-founder of Sun Microsystems, about:
how
Vinod Khosla,
Bill Joy,
Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott started Stanford University Network (SUN),
Onyx Systems and
Pizza Boxes for 40k USD, Sun opensourced 80% of its R & D budget, Sun was top 40 R & D spenders, opensource lowers the barrier to exit, IBM buying RedHat, Sun was the first company in 1982 shipping with TCP/IP, Scott was smart and the other founders were brilliant, Bill Joy wanted to open NFS or "what is a phone worth which doesn't connect with other phones",
Java Ring was on the cover of
Fortune Magazine,
Network is the Computer, Java was the greatest marketing efforts ever, missing the router hype was the earliest mistake at Sun, the beginnings of
JavaSoft, Bill Joy wanted to work with James Gosling, Java was invented to build a "clicker", Netscape, Java, JavaScript, LiveScript, JavaSoft was loosely coupled and highly aligned business unit, Java went with Netscape viral, being nervous and unprepared as speaker - people would like to hear what do you think as a speaker, "you don't have privacy, get over it",
Steve Jobs at JavaOne, Andy Bechtolsheim was the "industrial" Steve Jobs, Sun was having fun without offending somebody, John Gage - the Chief Science "Fiction" officer and the perfect MC for Java, 130 dollars for 3rd grade text book -- the beginnings of
curriki, global community of opensourcing education, curriki is a wildly successful startup, Scott is chairman of
wayin.com and still spends a lot of time with curriki,
corporate capitalism - private charity or Seperation of Concerns, the job of a chairman,
Larry Ellison and Scott, Scott met Larry on the airplane in early eighties -- and Larry gave Scott a shaver, behind the scenes of Sun's acquisition, Wayin -- the new project, Scott at twitter:
@scottmcnealy.