I love the story about how Sun was founded as told to me long ago by
Ralph Gorin, who for many years ran the computer networks at Stanford
University. According to Ralph, Xerox had installed a couple Alto
graphical workstations in the Carter White House, where they were
noticed by resident spies from the Central Intelligence Agency and
National Security Agency. These spooks wanted GUI workstations, so they
sent their IT people to Palo Alto to buy some from Xerox PARC.
[Xerox] decided to hit the feds with a huge bill -- one so
staggering that not even the spies would consider paying it. Before
flying back to Washington, however, they drove the two miles to
Stanford for lunch with Gorin.
There they saw the Stanford University Network (S.U.N.) Workstation
as designed by grad student Andy Bechtolsheim. The S.U.N. Workstation
was a poor man's Alto with a robust version of Unix, a graphical user
interface, local storage, mouse, and Ethernet. And the price was right,
too -- that is if Andy B could get anyone to actually build the
machines that the feds wanted to order.[I, Cringely]
