Four members of the team that launched Java at Sun Microsystems left in 1996 to start a company named after a musical instrument. Kim Polese had been Java's product manager. Arthur van Hoff, Sami Shaio and Jonathan Payne had written its code. Their company, Marimba, first promised to push live content to desktops over the internet. By its April 1999 offering, it had found steadier work: keeping software up to date on every computer a big company owned.

Push, Then Pivot

Marimba's product was Castanet, named, like the company, for an instrument. Early on it was hyped as "push" technology that would beam channels of content to users. That craze faded fast. Marimba turned Castanet toward corporate IT, where it could deliver and update applications on thousands of machines automatically. Customers named in its prospectus included Bear Stearns, Charles Schwab, Home Depot, Intuit and Sun Microsystems. Polese ran the company as chief executive, a rare woman leading a hot startup.

Twenty Dollars in April

Marimba priced its offering at $20 a share on April 30, 1999, and listed on Nasdaq as MRBA, at the height of the internet boom. When the bubble burst, spending on corporate software slowed and the stock sank far below its offer price. Marimba kept selling systems management software to large companies for five more years. In 2004 BMC Software bought it, folding Castanet into its own tools for running data centers.

Cover: The Strolling Musicians, Rembrandt van Rijn. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for strolling musicians (a marimba and castanets).