13 Oct
2014
13 Oct
'14
12:18 a.m.
On Oct 10, 2014, at 12:55, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
I was glad to see the end of the WICATs, because their
attempt at System
III was woeful; I had to do pre-sales demos, *knowing* that the damned
thing would crash on me, and got very good at excuses. "Sorry guys, we've
been having a bit of trouble with this new controller, but we're told
it'll be fixed Real Soon Now(tm)" when I knew that it was the poxy OS at
fault. How do you explain to the customer that the OS itself is
fundamentally rat-shit?
At Dual Systems, we never shipped AT&T USG System III to our customers, other than a
few alphas/betas - it was such a disaster, we spent a year fixing show-stopper bugs in it.
By the time we got System III into what we considered "shippable/supportable"
shape, System V was out, so we started work on that. Our customers had to jump from v7 to
System V, but they were spared System III.
System V was pretty awful too, but it was "industry standard" and we had to put
up with that idiocy from AT&T USG. I daily retreated back to the much more pleasant
use of BSD UNIX systems at UCB that I still had access to.
Erik <fair(a)netbsd.org>