...they got the cold shoulder. Later, he asked Joy, "Why didn't you talk to us?" and was told, "I was waiting for top management to show up," McNealy said.
Fellow computing expert Bechtolsheim and Joy hit it off, though. Joy had a collection of six VAX 750 computers from Digital Equipment Corp. "It looked like a computer centre, but they were actually my machines," Joy said. "I took him in the machine room. I walked up to a minicomputer, turned it off, pulled one of the boards out and said, 'Here, look at this. It's a very early system from DEC.' That was our way of bonding."
DEC was one of Sun's prime targets, and the company's success came at DEC's expense. "The VAX 750 had an 80MB disk drive, a couple [of] megabytes of memory" and was able to process about a million instructions per second, Joy said. "Andy's design from standard components, once we had the [Motorola] 68010, was the same thing but at one-tenth the price. That was really a revolution in capability."
Joy, who had earned a reputation as the power behind BSD, which modernised AT&T's Unix, was a major draw for early customers. McNealy handled purchasing calls in the company's early years using a phone with four or five lines. One early conversation went like this:
Customer: "Is Bill (Joy) onboard?"
McNealy: "Yeah."
Customer: "I want two of whatever you got. What are you selling?"
Among McNealy's other tasks was writing the company's first accounting software using the Unix vi editor — though he initially used Onyx systems and not Sun's own. He also oversaw "burn-in" tests to weed out flawed computers, turning off the office air conditioning to find any machines that couldn't endure the overheating.
Gage was the company's original salesman, McNealy said, and kept track of prospects on pink slips of paper. When calling back customers, "He'd organise pink slips by time zone. He'd start at the left side of his table and move right."
Joy marvelled at Gage's system. "Every once in awhile, John used to take all the slips and throw them in the trash. He said, 'If it's important, they'll call back.'"
The early years left an impression on McNealy, who still can recall how many millions of dollars in revenue the company garnered in each early year. "It was 8.5, 39, 110, 210, 450, then a billion. Then I forget after that," he said.
Sun has annual revenue of roughly $11bn now but has struggled financially in recent years. McNealy is confident that Sun will survive, though, because innovation matters and it's not easy for competitors to get started.
"Barriers to entry in our business are big, because it takes a lot of capital to do what we do... [HP] kind of checked out, in that they don't do microprocessors, operating systems, the software stack. At some point, you no longer are a car company, you are a car dealer," he said. "The major research and development is being done by [AMD] and Intel, Microsoft, Sun and IBM," he said.
And McNealy is convinced Sun has staying power. "There haven't been any other companies that started after Sun," he said. "We are the last server company that's survived."
