[ Thanks to starlover for this
link. ]
“Early in 2003, Hideya Kawahara, a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun
Microsystems, had an inspiration. Recognizing that desktops had not
changed substantially in 20 years, he set out to make them more
aesthetically appealing and more powerful. Operating on the
assumption that the next user interfaces would be 3D, he initiated
a side project that would consume at least two hours a day of his
spare time, plus most of his weekends and holidays for more than a
year before taking hold at Sun. Struck by the growing gap between a
computer’s 3D capabilities and what is found on most desktops, he
decided to leverage what he perceived as wasted potential.“He knew that Microsoft was designing a next-generation desktop,
but could find no Linux approach that satisfied him…”