From 1979 to 1982, Goldhaber worked in Pennsylvania politics as special assistant to the lieutenant governor William Scranton III and later as the interim director of the state's energy agency. Goldhaber left government to build a career in high technology and founded his first company, Centram Systems Inc., which developed networking for personal computers. Goldhaber was founder and chief executive of TOPS, a computer networking company which Goldhaber sold to Sun Microsystems in 1987 for $20 million. Goldhaber then served as Vice President of Sun Microsystems. Centram Systems product, called TOPS ("Transcendental Operating System"), allowed transparent file sharing among Macs, PCs, and Unix machines, using the AppleTalk protocol.
