Frederick C. Taverner

Summary

In April, 1995, I left Wagner Associates to join Sun Microsystems. Sun, the third largest computer company in the world, was founded in 1982 by four graduate students from Stanford University. The founders had the idea of building desktop computers from off-the-shelf, commercially available components. Every computer would run the UNIX operating system and would have built-in networking capability. In fact, the company name, Sun, is actually an acronym which stands for “Stanford University Network.” Sun is now a worldwide $12 billion company with 29,000 employees.

My first job at Sun was as a Systems Engineer in pre-sales for the Computer Systems division. As such, I worked with a set of Sales Representatives and acted as the technical consultant for their sales activities. My duties included understanding all of Sun's different technologies and our customer's computing requirements. I then combine the two to create computing solutions for our customers. My customer base included both very small and very large companies.

A customer wanted to upgrade a set of desktop terminals (called X-terminals) to stand alone desktop computers. This customer had, perhaps, ten employees and had just received some funding from a venture capital source to expand their operations. I met with the customer, inquired about their desktop requirements, and recommended desktop systems that met their needs. The customer purchased about $20,000 in Sun hardware. That customer became Infoseek, the famous Internet search engine company, and now they purchase about $5 million in Sun hardware and services each year.