John Gage

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John Gage
John Gage
Born	1942
Citizenship	American
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Sun Microsystems
Known for	Co-founder of Sun Co-founder of NetDay

John Burdette Gage (born 1942), is one of the founders of Sun Microsystems with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim and a few others in 1982. ^[1] He served as Chief Researcher and Vice President of the Science Office for Sun until leaving on June 9, 2008 to join Kleiner Perkins as a partner to help solve global warming.^[2][3]He is also best known as one of the co-founders of NetDay in 1995.

[edit] Background

Gage attended the University of California, Berkeley, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Business School. While at Berkeley, he was a leader in the anti-war movement and was a delegate for Robert Kennedy in 1968 for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, representing Berkeley and Alameda County, California. He co-chaired the Robert Kennedy campaign in Alameda County. ^[4] Gage had worked at Berkeley with Bill Joy, the person largely responsible for the authorship of Berkeley UNIX, also known as BSD, from which springs many modern forms of UNIX, including Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. ^[5] Gage founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Bill Joy and others.

In April, 2002, Gage joined the Markle Taskforce on National Security in the Information Age, whose two reports explore how federal, state and local governments collect, analyze and use information as it relates to national security and homeland defense. Their two reports, when joined with the reports of the 9/11 Commission and the WMD Commission Report, formed the foundation for the 2004-2005 reforms of the intelligence and homeland security communities.

[edit] NetDay

President Bill Clinton installing computer cables with Vice President Al Gore on NetDay at Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, CA. March 9, 1996.

Gage is perhaps also best known as one of the founders of NetDay in 1995 with Michael Kaufman. NetDay "called on high-tech companies to commit resources to schools, libraries, and clinics worldwide so that they could connect to the Internet." ^[6] It was endorsed by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore who were active participants in NetDay'96.^[7] In 1998, Gage was awarded the ACM Presidential Award by Chuck House, the President of the ACM for his work on NetDay. ^[8]

[edit] Global warming

In 2008, Gage joined Kleiner Perkins as a venture capitalist along with Al Gore.^[6] His goal is to "help solve environmental problems, specifically global warming. He will focus mainly on "green" technology investments, a growing area for Kleiner, which last month announced a new $500 million fund to target large, green-tech companies. Kleiner has backed "clean" companies in areas such as electric vehicles, biofuels and others."^[2]

[edit] Notes

[edit] Publications

• Information Technology and Economic Development, in Economic Development, 1999, Oxford University Press.

[edit] External links

• Official website
• Smithsonian Institute Leadership Award Oral History - 29 March 1999
• Association for Computing Machinery Video Interview with John Gage
• Power to the People: Why is John Gage, a bearded old Berkeley troublemaker, carrying the corporate flag for the Pentagon's favorite computer maker?