We first contacted Sun almost by accident at a Microsoft Developer's conference in 1992. Steve Gadol was the recipient of some information about our Patented idea. He listened very interestedly, said "hmm - pcode, there's an idea we forgot all about; can you send me a synopsis?" Which we did.

Six years later, we sent the following email to steve.

What was interesting was that when we finally got hold of this gentleman on the phone, he stated that he had forwarded it to the proper parties at Sun. No acknowledgement, no reply (and no bounce of the email either!). Since the Java project started some time in 1991 and took some abrupt shift (which the books have so far been unclear in characterising  - see the first three pages of "inside Java"  by Siyan and Weaver, for example) to become what it now is before its announcement in 1995. Could it be that the "gee golly gosh" was Steve going back to Sun and saying "if we have our modules in pcode, we can use dynamic linking and ship them around a network on demand" (my imagination, of course) ?

Meanwhile we were not idle :)

We started off with Sun's Web page, and identified JanPeter Scheerda as a likely contact. As director of SunSoft he was gracious enough to put us in touch with Kathi Stafford. After some fairly significant delays, due she told us to reassignment of corporate responsibilities, she graciously put us in touch with Erwin Basinski, one of Sun's most senior patent attorneys (as far as we can tell he has since retired).

We had some excellent discussions with "Erv" and on 18th August 1998, he passed us on to Alex Silverman, who was to be our contact for the next several months.

On 22nd September we told Alex all about the principle of the patent and in particular about our implementations of Code Servers to date, whereupon he became most enthusiastic. He told us that this patent needed to be brought to the attention of Lee Patch, who was unfortunately the lead counsel for Sun in the lawsuit against Microsoft about Java. He went so far as to say that there were no less than SEVEN (count 'em) groups within Sun that we should, in an ideal world, be talking to.

These were:
 

1	The Solaris O/S group
2	The Java Software group
3	The Set Top Box group
4	The Network Computer group
5	The JINI project
6	Application Servers
7	Java O/S.

In connection with #6, on 14th October, Alex specifically mentioned trying to set up an interview with James Gosling the "father of Java". Now we thought, we are really getting somewhere at last.

On 30th October, the blow fell! An internal reorganization had occurred at Sun, and all discussions of this kind were suspended pending approval from the new Chief Technical Officer, Greg Pappadopoulos.

And that was essentially the last we heard.