Technology History | 1 Hacker Way — The Back of the Sign Still Says Sun Microsystems

The sign at the corner of Willow Road and Bayfront Expressway has two faces, and only one of them says Meta.

Walk around it and the other side still reads Sun Microsystems.

That was a decision, not an oversight. Ben Barry, who worked as a designer at Facebook then, has explained that the sign came with the property, so instead of ordering a new one they turned it around and painted the front.

Zuckerberg gave Lev Grossman of TIME the same account, describing the old logo as a standing reminder of what happens to a company that takes its eye off the ball.

Sun had built the 57-acre, million-square-foot campus at 1601 Willow Road and addressed it 1 Network Drive.

Oracle bought Sun in 2009, and the site came free.

Sun's own staff had called the place Sun Quentin, on the grounds that there was nowhere to eat and nothing within walking distance.

Facebook announced the move in February 2011 and signed a fifteen-year leaseback with an option to purchase after five years, so the common shorthand that it bought the campus that year is wrong.

The move ran in three waves.

About 500 employees left Palo Alto for Building 10 in early August 2011, and the last of roughly 2,000 walked in on the morning of Monday 19 December.

The address changed as well. Business cards reading 1 Hacker Way surfaced that December, and an employee told TechCrunch the campus had nearly been named 1 Social Circle until Google+ launched its Circles and the idea was quietly dropped.

The interiors were finished to look unfinished, with chalkboard paint down the corridors and Sun's logo-etched glass doors reused on the conference rooms.

This pin is Building 10, where the first wave landed.

The campus is a private workplace with no public tour, so the sign a few hundred metres southwest at the Willow Road entrance is the whole of what a visitor can see.

The Sun side faces away from the road, toward the buildings, which makes it the side employees read on the way out.

The cover photograph shows the entrance sign from the intersection; the second is an aerial of the campus against the Bayfront salt ponds, whose photographer notes in his caption that this was Sun's headquarters before it was Facebook's.

Photo: LPS.1, CC0, and Jitze Couperus, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons