John Gage

His mother was Harriet Doris Burdette, born in Hollywood, California, whose grandfather crossed the Panama Isthmus to arrive in California in 1848.

She taught in the Los Angeles school district.

He has two siblings, James Collier Gage of Honolulu, Hawaii, and Laurie Gage, chief veterinarian for the Marine Mammal Center in Marin County, and US Department of Agriculture big cat and marine mammal expert.

Gage was educated at Gardner Street Elementary School and LeConte Junior High School in Hollywood, California.

He appears in American Stories: the American Dream: A Future Reborn 1918–1945, a five-part Discovery Channel documentary produced by Atlantic Productions.

He was the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems, where he is credited with creating the phrase The Network is the Computer.

His father was James Robert Gage, born in Woodville, East Texas, and president of the UCLA Class of 1935, captain in the United States Navy, and senior manager for Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, then for McDonnell Douglas Aerospace in Seal Beach.

John Burdette Gage (born October 9, 1942) is a retired computer scientist and technology executive.

Gage was born on October 9, 1942, in Long Beach, California.

In 1956, the family moved to Newport Beach, California.

Gage attended Ensign Middle School and Newport Harbor High School, where he was student body president, All-American swimmer, and National Merit Scholar.

He received the Harvard Book Award, and graduated in 1960.

Gage entered the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1960, in Honors Mathematics.

In 1961, he entered the Alliance Française in Paris, then studied at the Université de Paris.

Returning to Berkeley, he became deeply involved in the Free Speech Movement, as documented in Berkeley in the Sixties.

He created the first Community Projects Office for the Associated Students of the University of California, placing over 2,000 students in volunteer roles in schools and community organizations in Oakland and Berkeley.

He was a three-time All-American swimmer and Pacific Coast champion in the 100-yard breaststroke.

He played on the Pacific Coast champion water polo team.

He was a member of the Order of the Golden Bear and the Big C Society.

In 1968, he joined six other students from California on the delegation assembled by Speaker of the California Assembly, Jesse Unruh, as a Robert F. Kennedy delegate to the Chicago Democratic Convention.

Gage received his bachelor's degree in 1975 from the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley.

He also attended Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School.

Gage worked at Berkeley with Bill Joy, the person largely responsible for the authorship of Berkeley UNIX, also known as BSD, from which spring many modern forms of UNIX, including Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

Gage helped found Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Bill Joy and others.

Gage is one of the central figures in Mark Kitchell's film Berkeley in the Sixties, recounting Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.

He is known as one of the co-founders of NetDay in 1995, a crowd-sourced effort to bring the Internet to every school in the world.

NetDay was the first large-scale crowd-sourced mass movement on the Internet.

He was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the Web Based Education Commission in 2000.

He served on the US National Academy of Sciences Committee on Scientific Communication and National Security and on the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security, whose reports aided in reorganizing US intelligence agencies after the September 11 attacks.

He has served on the boards of the US National Library of Medicine, of FermiLab, the Berkeley Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and other scientific and educational groups.

Currently he serves on the Malaysian International Advisory Panel, the Malaysian Global Science Advisory Panel and on the advisory boards of the University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy, the Oxford Martin School for the Twenty-first Century, the Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at Berkeley, and of Liquid Robotics, who build unmanned ocean surface robots.

He is on the boards of the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation in Nairobi, the Human Needs Project, and Relief International, an international humanitarian disaster relief organization.

In 2006, he joined the board of the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation, to build a school and orphanage in Kapenguria, in remote north-west Kenya.

He served as Sun's vice president and chief researcher and director of the Science Office, until leaving on June 9, 2008, to join Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner to work on green technologies for global warming; he departed KPCB in 2010 to apply what he had learned "to broader issues in other parts of the world".

In June 2008, Gage retired from Sun Microsystems and joined Kleiner Perkins as a venture capitalist along with Al Gore.

He left Kleiner Perkins in 2010.

Gage has served on scientific advisory panels for the US National Research Council, the US National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum.

In 2012, he helped build the Kibera Town Centre, a major water and community education center in the middle of Kibera, Kenya, the largest slum in Africa.

He joined the Human Needs Project in 2012 to build a networked water source and water treatment plant in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya.

For twelve years he hosted the annual JavaOne conference, bringing 20,000 Java programmers to San Francisco and establishing the Java language in over 95% of mobile devices, and as the basis of the Android operating system.