McNealy, Scott (1954-…), was the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun made servers, computers that provide requested resources to other computers linked to them on a network.
McNealy was born on Nov. 13, 1954, in Columbus, Indiana, and grew up in Springfield Hills, Michigan. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1976 and a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University in 1980.
In 1982, McNealy was invited by Vinod Khosla, an engineer he had met while at Stanford, to join in starting a computer company. McNealy and Khosla, along with Andreas V. Bechtolsheim, a product designer, and William N. Joy, a software programmer, founded Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun linked microcomputers together in powerful networks rather than having many people share a single computer, as was common at the time. These networks quickly became popular with people working in high-technology fields. In 1995, Sun introduced Java, a software programming language for the Internet. Java is a cross-platform language, which means it can run on many different computer operating systems, including UNIX, Macintosh O/S, and Windows.
Khosla left Sun in 1984, and McNealy became the company’s president, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO). McNealy was chairman of Sun from 1984 until the company was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. He served as president of Sun from 1984 to 1999 and from 2002 to 2004 and was CEO from 1984 to 2006.
