Sun Microsystems. Hackers remember that the name was originally an
acronym, Stanford University Network. Sun started out around 1980
with some hardware hackers (mainly) from Stanford talking to some
software hackers (mainly) from UC Berkeley; Sun's original technology
concept married a clever board design based on the Motorola 68000 to
{BSD} Unix. Sun went on to lead the workstation industry through the
1980s, and for years afterwards remained an engineering-driven
company and a good place for hackers to work. Though Sun drifted away
from its techie origins after 1990 and has since made some strategic
moves that disappointed and annoyed many hackers (especially by
maintaining proprietary control of Java and rejecting Linux), it's
still considered within the family in much the same way {DEC} was in
the 1970s and early 1980s.
[glossary]