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Scott McNealy Bio, Founder of Sun Microsystems

The current chairman of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy was born November 13, 1954, in Columbus, Indiana, and co-founded Sun in 1982 with Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla. The company was built around the Stanford University Network (SUN) Unix processor Bechtolsheim had developed in college, and was part of a large wave of interdependent Silicon Valley startup companies. Unlike most of his colleagues, McNealy came from a business background, having gone to Stanford's Graduate School of Business for his MBA after receiving a Bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard. He succeeded Khosla as Chief Executive Officer of Sun in 1984, and served in that role until 2006 -- one of the few major corporation CEOs to serve a tenure of over two decades.

The company, due to the specialization of its customer base, never became as big or well-known as some other computer manufacturers, but did experience enormous growth during the dotcom bubble. At that time, many of the startup companies seeking their fortunes online did so with expensive Sun servers, often bigger and faster than they really needed, in expectation of the sort of growth experienced by such success stories as eBay and Yahoo. When the bubble burst in 2001, Sun's performance staggered and slowed, and the sudden influx of barely-used Sun hardware onto the resale market not only meant a reduced number of customers, it meant that the company was competing with its own used goods. There were several rounds of layoffs and other downsizings.

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