Sun Microsystems had a knack for getting in early on big trendssometimes crazy early. Consider its embrace of encryption. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Since users of Sun workstations could exchange data, company engineers worried about protecting it. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
We put in an empty socket, where we would add the chip if it ever came, Bechtolsheim said. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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