List of Sun Microsystems employees

Sun Microsystems, from its inception in 1982 to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2010, became known for being "something of a farm system for Silicon Valley." It had a number of employees credited with notable achievements before, during or after their tenure there.

A courtyard at the Sun main campus in Santa Clara, California

A

• Brian Aker, MySQL Director of Technology
• Ken Arnold, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, co-author of The Java Programming Language

B

• Carol Bartz, head of SunFed, Sun service and worldwide operations; Autodesk CEO, Yahoo! CEO
• Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun co-founder, systems designer and Silicon Valley investor
• Joshua Bloch, author of Effective Java
• Jon Bosak, chair of the original XML working group
• Jeff Bonwick, slab-allocator, vmem and ZFS
• Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell
• Tim Bray, Sun Director of Web Technologies
• David J. Brown, SUN workstation at Stanford; Solaris at Sun
• Paul Buchheit, engineer at Sun from May 1997 to August 1997; Creator of Gmail

C

• Bryan Cantrill, of 2005 Technology Review "Top 35 Young Innovators", co-inventor of DTrace
• Alfred Chuang, co-founder of BEA Systems
• Danny Cohen, co-creator of Cohen-Sutherland line clipping algorithms; coined the computer terms "Big Endians" and "Little Endians" (Endianness)
• Bill Coleman, co-founder of BEA Systems
• Danese Cooper, open source specialist

D

• James Duncan Davidson, creator of the Tomcat web container and the Ant build tool
• L. Peter Deutsch, founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript
• Whitfield Diffie, Chief Security Officer, co-inventor of public-key cryptography
• Robert Drost, one of Technology Review's 2004 "Top 100 Young Innovators"

F

• Dan Farmer, computer security researcher
• Marc Fleury, creator of the JBoss application server
• Ned Freed, email systems researcher, co-author of several MIME RFCs

G

• Richard P. Gabriel, Lisp expert and founder of Lucid, Inc.
• John Gage, Chief Researcher and former Science Officer; first Sun salesman
• John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cygnus Solutions
• Gary Ginstling, music industry executive
• James Gosling, co-inventor of Java; creator of NeWS networked extensible window system; author of the first (proprietary) Unix implementation of the Emacs text editor
• Todd Greanier, software architect, author and instructor
• Brendan Gregg, author of DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD, Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud

J

• Kim Jones, Vice President of Global Education, Government and Health Sciences; CEO of Sun UK from 2007; CEO of Curriki
• Bill Joy, Sun co-founder and architect of BSD Unix; author of the vi text editor

K

• Vinod Khosla, Sun co-founder and Silicon Valley investor

L

• Susan Landau, mathematician and cybersecurity expert
• Adam Leventhal, co-inventor of DTrace
• Peter van der Linden, former manager of kernel group, author of numerous Java and C books

M

• Chris Malachowsky, co-founder of NVIDIA
• Clark Masters EVP, Enterprise Systems and Father of the E10K, President of SunFed
• Craig McClanahan, creator or the Apache Struts framework and architect of Tomcat's servlet container, Catalina
• Scott McNealy, co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Sun; CEO from 1984-2006
• Larry McVoy, CEO of BitMover
• Björn Michaelsen, Director at The Document Foundation
• Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB from 2001 until Sun acquisition in 2008
• Jim Mitchell, Vice President and Sun Fellow
• Ian Murdock, Vice President of Developer and Community Marketing, founder of Debian

N

• Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
• Patrick Naughton, co-creator of Java
• Jakob Nielsen, web-design usability authority
• Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google

O

• John Ousterhout, inventor of the Tcl scripting language

P

• Greg Papadopoulos, Executive Vice President and CTO
• Radia Perlman, sometimes known as the "Mother of the Internet"
• Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer
• Kim Polese, prominent dot-com era executive
• Curtis Priem, co-founder of NVIDIA

R

• George Reyes, former CFO of Google, Inc.
• David S. H. Rosenthal, early X Window System developer and original designer of the ICCCM
• Wayne Rosing, project lead for the Apple Lisa; Sun hardware development manager and manager of Sun Labs

S

• Bob Scheifler, leader of X Window System development from 1984 to 1996
• Eric Schmidt, former Sun Chief Technology Officer, chairman and former CEO of Google, Inc., and co-developer of lex
• Jonathan I. Schwartz, former Sun President and CEO
• Ed Scott, co-founder of BEA Systems
• Mike Shapiro, co-inventor of DTrace
• Bob Sproull, computer graphics pioneer
• Guy L. Steele, Jr., co-inventor of the Scheme programming language and member of IEEE standards committees of many programming languages
• Bert Sutherland, manager of Sun Labs, Xerox PARC, BBN Computer Science Division
• Ivan Sutherland, computer graphics pioneer

T

• Bruce Tognazzini, computer usability consultant
• Marc Tremblay, microprocessor architect and Sun's employee with the most awarded patents
• Bud Tribble, former VP of software development at NeXT, VP of software technology at Apple

W

• Jim Waldo, lead architect of Jini
• Michael Widenius, original author of MySQL

Y

• William Yeager, software architect, inventor of the multi-protocol router

Z

• Ed Zander, former president of Sun Microsystems; former CEO of Motorola