Andy Bechtolsheim

Andy Bechtolsheim, whose full name is Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim, is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor, born on 30 September 1955. He grew up in Bavaria, Rome and Nonnenhorn on Lake Constance, designed an industrial controller built on the Intel 8008 at the age of sixteen, and won the physics prize of the Jugend forscht competition in 1974. After studying electrical engineering at the Technical University of Munich he moved to the United States with a Fulbright scholarship and earned a master's degree in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 1976. As a doctoral student at Stanford he designed the SUN workstation, a powerful networked computer named for the Stanford University Network and inspired by the Xerox Alto. In 1982 he left Stanford to co-found Sun Microsystems as employee number one, together with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy, and served as its chief hardware designer.