Tales of the rising Sun

...and self-confidence is in large part why he succeeds in doing so, Khosla said.

McNealy has praised Jobs on occasion, but he acknowledged on Wednesday that he doesn't have time to listen to his own iPod and forecasted doom for the popular digital music player. The right place to store music is on the network, where it can be accessed by many devices, he said, much like the right place to store voice mail is on a central server.

"Your iPod is like your home answering machine. It's a temporary thing," McNealy said. "It's going to be hard to sell a lot of iPods five years from now, when every mobile phone is going to be able to automatically access your library wherever you are."

Of course, Sun is the company that wants to sell the servers that could store such material, the software that could govern access rights and the Java software to power mobile phones. Its various product lines are reflected in the company's tagline: "The network is the computer."

The tagline was invented by Sun's chief researcher, John Gage, whose hiring at Sun was a condition that Joy placed on his own employment. Gage invented the phrase while headed to Japan for a trip, he said, but the second half of the expression never caught on — "The machine is the manual," meaning that using a computer should be a self-explanatory experience.

Another close call with Apple came in 1991, when for an April Fool's Day joke, vice-presidents at Apple and Sun went to the other company's chief executive staff meeting, Gage said. The executives wore masks made of 8-by-10-inch glossy photos of their counterparts from the other company.

Apple chief executive John Sculley was not amused when Bechtolsheim arrived wearing a mask. "Sculley looked stone-faced. Maybe he thought some terrorists were trying to take over," he said.

But the founders didn't restrict themselves to the past. McNealy reiterated his infamous quotation from the 1990s — "You have no privacy. Get over it" — and forecast that today's trend of mobile phone cameras will transform into tomorrow's trend of using the devices to record everything that happens.

"They're going to put this [mobile-phone recording device] right here (in a shirt pocket) and walk around all day and record it," McNealy said.

Joy had a similar view. "Technology and privacy are on a collision course," he said, because ever-cheaper processor technology means it's constantly getting easier to create sensors and collect data. "The tip toward the public space being much less private is one that's hard to fight. It has Moore's Law on its side."

Early days at Sun
As it turned out, McNealy wasn't the only founder who didn't leap at the chance to join Sun.

Khosla had to convince Bechtolsheim that he was more interested in the computer engineer than the software he was licensing from him. However, Bechtolsheim was reluctant because his licensing business brought in $500,000 a year and Bechtolsheim had a year to go before finishing his doctorate, Khosla and Bechtolsheim said.

Convincing Joy wasn't easy either. McNealy said he and others piled into a rattletrap of a car to visit the Unix wizard across the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, but...

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