David Yen

Life Under the Sun: My 20-Year Journey at Sun Microsystems David Yen

The author David Yen spent 20 years at Sun Microsystems, Inc. In the 1990s, he led the development of Sun's first- and second-generation multi-CPU SMP servers, which transformed Sun from a workstation company to a leading enterprise server company. As head of Sun's Microelectronics group in 2001, he turned around Sun's declining SPARC microprocessor business, introducing the industry's first 8-core, 32-thread general-purpose processor in 2005 and developing it into a multi-billion dollar business. Sun was "the Google in the '90s" and highly regarded for its innovations even in the Silicon Valley. Founded in 1982 by Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, and Vinod Khosla and started as a workstation vendor using off-the-shelf components, Sun surpassed established information technology giants such as Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the '90s and became "the dot in .com" in that crazy late '90s era. In the twenty years that the author worked at Sun, he got to witness the rise and eventually the fall of the company. The author was not on the very top of the decision making layer, yet he was on a level high enough to know and sometimes influence what was going on. By documenting what he experienced and what his thoughts were at the time, the author believes he might have provided a piece of reading that young engineering graduates could get a preview of what they may experience, young business administration graduates could get a peek at thoughts of engineering management, contemporary industry veterans could get some smiles from time to time if what the author described triggered the reminiscence of their own, and readers outside of Silicon Valley could get a glimpse of how the Valley operates through various behind-the-scene stories.