Former Sun Micro Execs Recall Trail-Blazing Times

Sun Microsystems had a knack for getting in early on big trendssometimes crazy early. Consider its embrace of encryption.

Founders of the Silicon Valley computer maker who attended a reunion over the weekend noted that Sun made an unusual bet on the data-scrambling technology in its first products, more than three decades before revelations about National Security Agency data-gathering turned the privacy safeguard into a household word.

Sun, founded in 1982 and sold to Oracle in 2010 after a long slump, made its name with desktop workstations that ran their own software and came with built-in networking capability using the then-nascent technology Ethernet. Networking was a novel addition at a time when most corporate computing was conducted on minicomputers and mainframes, used with simple terminals.

Since users of Sun workstations could exchange data, company engineers worried about protecting it.

I couldnt imagine how you could do networking without encryption, said Vinod Khosla, the Sun co-founder and venture capitalist, in a conversation with reporters during the event in Mountain View, Calif.

And not just any form of encryption. Andy Bechtolsheim, who came up with the early workstation designs as a Stanford University graduate student, said colleagues like programmer Bill Joy argued that using software to scramble data wouldnt offer enough protection.

The only approach that seemed secure enough from tampering would be to use hardware. So Sun put a socket on circuit boards in early machines to accommodate an encryption chip, even though such chips werent readily available at the time.

We put in an empty socket, where we would add the chip if it ever came, Bechtolsheim said.

Chips that could handle the crypto calculations eventually did arrive, but created another problem: U.S. regulations wouldnt let Sun export a machine with built-in encryption, Bechtolsheim says.

Few buyers of Sun workstations used the technology anyway, Khosla added, so it was eventually removed. The episode typifies the repeated tendency of Sun executives to make decisions based on a belief in what made the most sense technologically, not necessarily commercially.

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Former Sun Micro Execs Recall Trail-Blazing Times