SUN.COM Turns 10
Sun.com began as a box in a closet. A small team of engineers used it to post a single page of type as the Sun home page on the Internet. That was ten years ago this week.
Today, sun.com is a large federation of Web sites served from four data centers, housing 2,000,000 pages and serving more than a million visitors a day. It’s powered by a dozen machines, each twenty times as powerful as the original little box.
Hassan Schroeder was the first sun.com Webmaster. “I was in a small group working to get Sun online with its first Web site,” says Schroeder. On January 28, 1994, a co-worker typed in a page of Sun’s Annual Report as the only content. “All text, not even a Sun logo,” remembers Schroeder. The page was hosted from a single-processor SPARC station located in a networking lab the size of a closet. Schroeder was there to plug the machine in. “That evening, I logged in from home on a 9600 baud modem and saw that we had received our first e-mail addressed to webmaster@sun.com. It just said, ‘Cool!'”