16 Jul
2011
16 Jul
'11
3:05 a.m.
To call this joint is complete nonsense. Sun was in a
cash bind, AT&T
wanted to make SVR4 the main Unix platform and SunOS was winning. The
story I heard, not widely known, is that AT&T bought a big pile of Sun
stock at 35% over market - in return for which Sun had to dump their BSD
based SunOS and go to SVR4.
Biggest mistake Sun ever made in my opinion.
"Sun has helped spark a major controversy within the UNIX community
that may have split it into different directions.
The controversy began to heat up in October 1987, when AT&T announced
that it would license Sun's SPARC architecture as the basis for AT&T
computer systems. Furthermore, said AT&T, it was going to collaborate
with Sun to develop a UNIX "standard" that would eliminate
deficiencies in the operating system--such as lack of features for
commercial applications--and be compatible at the binary level across
the entire SPARC architecture.
Not surprisingly, other companies in the UNIX Community smelled
incipient monopolistic practices that would give AT&T and Sun an
unqualified advantage in the UNIX market. These moves would
effectively make the Sun/AT&T-developed System V and SPARC proprietary
standards controlled by the two companies. This perception was
bolstered in January 1988, when AT&T announced that it had agreed to
purchase 20 percent of Sun by buying shares, in amounts and at times
determined by Sun, at 25 percent above current market value."
[Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems, p. 112-113]