Some time ago I came into a copy of Sun’s “Open Minds” book, which commemorated the company’s tenth anniversary (1982-1992). Copies were given to employees at the time. Sun had recently become the top-selling workstation vendor (~1991) and was in a dominant market position.

book cover

The book is very well made and came with a slipcover (not pictured) to protect it.

scott mcnealy letter

It opens with a letter from Scott McNealy. Sun would indeed make it to 2002, but troubles would start not long after.

founders

The founding fathers of Sun.

sun 1

The Sun-1, along with a great story about shipping the first units. Ironically, this parallels the classic Oracle story where Oracle Version 2 was the first one sold to customers to give the perception that they had a more mature product.

pranks pranks2

Sun had a famous prank culture. The ex-employee I acquired this book from had been party to some of the pranks above. Note that “Eric” here refers to Eric Schmidt.

roadmap

Pictured here is the Sun roadmap at the time of release.

customer

Sun highlighted a number of well known customers in the book. Pictured here is a spread of the AT&T US operations center at the time, which was run by Sun systems on the backend (note that AT&T UNIX terminals are shown in the foreground, however).