Today, Sun and Hewlett Packard announced an agreement for HP to distribute and support Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system on HP ProLiant server and blade platforms.  Jonathan Schwartz called it “the single biggest and most important OEM/distribution agreement Sun’s ever signed for the open source Solaris operating system.”

I first became involved with Hewlett Packard in 1977, when I took a computer architecture class in college and did an in-depth analysis of the HP1000 computer architecture for a class project. When I graduated from BYU in 1978, HP offered me digital design position in the desktop computer division in Fort Collins, Colorado.  I turned them down, in favor of staying with little Eyring Research Institute, in Provo, Utah, where I had been working for a year. In 1979, I led a project for Eyring that installed the first network of HP1000 computers at 3M company, in a magnetic tape manufacturing facility in Hutchinson, Minnesota.  That all goes to show how ancient I am and what amazing progress has been made by HP and the rest of the computer industry since then.

Now, these many years later, it is a pleasure to be at Sun and see a new partnership being forged by these two key industry players.

Congratulations to Sun and HP for linking up on this milestone relationship!

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Solaris