Sun's Unconventional Thinkers Contrarian Minds

The story of Project Portmeirion begins over a cup of tea.

Mario Wolczko, whose name suggests his heritage (Italian mother, Ukrainian father), was born and raised in England and still buys loose leaf tea by the kilo. Every day at 3 p.m. he brews a pot for his colleagues in Sun Labs, and on one of those occasions he and Greg Wright, who is also British, hit upon an idea.

"We had worked together for a number of years on a project that was trying to bring hardware support to the world of Java, and even though we'd come up with what we thought were interesting schemes, we were having an unsuccessful time getting the SPARC designers to adopt any of it," Wolczko recalls. "The conclusion was their lives are difficult enough already. Then we come along and offer them something that has, potentially, a lot of upside, but also a lot of risk."

Exactly what they didn't need.

So, over a number of tea times, Wolczko and Wright began to talk about how they might address that problem – the increasingly complex task of designing and testing microprocessors. 

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