The Extinguished Sun
In every sphere of human activity, there are special dates, sacred names, important events, beloved images, and revered objects. It's important for a person to treat something with reverence, to admire, to adore, to idolize. And it's important for all of humanity to keep records, so that achievements and triumphs are imprinted in beautiful calligraphy, while failures and mistakes are shoved in a corner in a barely legible footnote in tiny type—or, better yet, not a word about them at all.
Many, of course, might shrug and turn away, preoccupied with loan repayments, the score of the latest Shakhtar-Dynamo match, or the atrocities committed by Libyan rebels against Colonel Gaddafi's civilian tanks. But most, one hopes, will at least momentarily be touched by the regret and pain of loss when the Taliban in Afghanistan blow up an ancient Buddhist monument, some lunatic in the Hermitage splashes acid on Rembrandt's "Danae," and yet another developer encases the still-green Dnieper embankment in glass and concrete.
On February 24, 1982, through the efforts of four friends and colleagues—Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy—the high-tech company Sun Microsystems was founded in Santa Clara, California. These were glorious times for the IT industry. Sun was a progressive company with great potential, wise owners, and competent employees. It largely defined the face of the modern world. Without its developments and achievements, the 21st century would be completely different. SPARC processors, the Solaris operating system, the Java software environment, excellent servers, and the Star Office office suite.
The bold and innovative company grew rich and began acquiring promising companies—Interactive, Praxsys, Cray, NetBeans, Cobalt, MySQL. But at some point, the company collapsed under the weight of its assets, and on January 27, 2010, it was acquired, complete and complete, for $7.4 billion by Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle. Naturally, Sun Microsystems' structures were subsequently integrated into the new owner's business model.
But no one could have imagined that Oracle would even hint at selling the SUN.COM domain, which it no longer needed? According to insiders, the idea of selling the domain has indeed been raised within Oracle's management, and they are seriously considering it. According to various estimates, the possible auction price for this name will range from $700,000 to $1 million. The final decision on the domain's fate will be made after July 1, when the last bytes of sun.com content are moved to Oracle's main website.
The Sun.com domain was registered on March 19, 1986, becoming the 11th domain on the global internet. Today, according to Alexa, it ranks 2200th in terms of traffic, with an audience of 1.3 million visitors in February 2011.
