Sun at 25: Where are the founders now?

Sun Microsystems is still around. But what about the four men who gave it life? We went on the hunt for Sun's founding fathers: Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. Here's what we found.

Andy Bechtolsheim: An eye for innovation, and the bottom line

Working at Xerox Park in Palo Alto as a summer student, Andy Bechtolsheim saw something in Xerox's Alto network workstation that Xerox itself couldn't: the possibilities of what such a machine could do with a high resolution display, a mouse, and a GUI.

"The strange thing was [Xerox] never really productized it," Bechtolsheim says of the Alto, which inspired the creation of Apple's Lisa personal compute, as well as a machine that Bechtolsheim would build and dub the Stanford University Network -- or SUN -- workstation.

Besides the convenience of a graphical interface, just not having to wait in a time share system for a few cycles was a "beautiful thing," Bechtolsheim recalls of the Alto and the later SUN workstation, which he envisioned as a tool primarily for CAD/CAM users.

After Bechtolsheim's SUN workstation gave birth to Sun Microsystems, Bechtolsheim says he took a great deal of pride in the fact that his Sparc Workstation 1 and 2 drove half the revenue of the company for almost its first 10 years.

As it turned out, spotting technology that has the potential to generate lots of revenue is something Bechtolsheim has a talent for. After leaving Sun in 1995, disappointed over the company's refusal to jump on the x86 bandwagon, Bechtolsheim found success with Granite Systems, a gigabit Ethernet switching company that Cisco acquired after a year. His next company, Kealia, was acquired by Sun in 2004, returning Bechtolsheim to the fold. Somewhere in between, Bechtolsheim also wrote a now legendary US$100,000 check in 1998 to two more young Stanford grads -- Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- for what seemed like a promising idea: a search technology they called PageRank.

What did he see in Google that few others did? "It was a complete no-brainer," Bechtolsheim answers. Using the Internet to find things, he was frustrated that he couldn't find anything anymore, especially as companies started to game the system, as he calls it, by using key words to get a better placement.

When Bechtolsheim heard about Google's ability to do page ranking, he knew that would solve the problem. It is said his US$100,000 investment is now worth half a billion.

Back at Sun after a long hiatus, Bechtolsheim says he's determined to put the company back on the track to the innovation and big profits that characterized its first 18 years. Whether or not he continues to have the Midas touch remains to be seen.

-- Ephraim Schwartz