October 11th, 2009
Scott McNealy names Sun's top 10 tech innovations
In his first big appearance since it was announced this spring that Oracle was going to buy Sun Microsystems, Sun chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy got sentimental on Sunday night in his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco.
Although the Oracle-Sun deal hasn’t gone through yet, McNealy sounded a lot like a leader who knew he was making one of his last major speeches as Sun’s chairman. He talked about how much he’s enjoyed innovating in the technology space over the past couple decades and thanked the Sun employees and customers who came along for the ride.
He also threw his weight behind the Oracle deal and tried to reassure Sun customers that an Oracle-Sun pair-up is going to be all rainbows and unicorns.
However, the most interesting part of his presentation was when he named his list of the “Top 10 Innovations from Sun.” Here is the list, copied verbatim from McNealy’s slides:
- NFS/PC-NFS Technology
- SPARC (first 7-10 MIPS workstation under $10K)
- Open Source Software
- BSD + UNIX System 5 = Solaris
- Java (Java card, Java SE/ME/EE and Java FX)
- E10K (64-way Solaris)
- ZFS/Open Storage/Flash (Exadata)
- Project Blackbox, world’s first modular datacenter
- SunRay
- Chip Multi-threading “CoolThreads”
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took the stage after McNealy and said, “It’s dazzling thinking of all the innovation that’s come from Sun over the last couple decades.”
At that point I was waiting for them to cue the unicorns to run across the stage, but it didn’t happen. There must be city ordinances against such a thing in San Francisco.
Jason Hiner is the Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, ZDNet's sister site. Read his blog Tech Sanity Check at hiner.techrepublic.com. You can also find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and JasonHiner.com.
