13 Jul
2011
13 Jul
'11
1:26 a.m.
"Joint project". Hmm, I was at Sun at the time, John Pope was across
the hall from me, he did the SVR4 port to Sun/SPARC.
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.
On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 05:11:15PM +0200, Michele Ghisolfo wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com
Contrary to a
lot of the distant opinions here,
SVr4 was actually a joint project between USL
(the AT&T commercial-UNIX organization) and Sun.
The intent was to bring together the two different
commercial-UNIX cults (what Stu Feldman once referred
to as Sunni and Shiite UNIX).
I was at Bell Labs while this was going on, but
well off to the side of the effort, in a research
group where we tended (foolishly) to look down
our noses a bit at the whole thing. I do know that
there were a lot of ruffled feathers within USL
about the allegedly overbearing Sun guys, and it
wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that there
were similar feelings going the other way. On
the other hand there were some pretty smart
people involved at a technical level on all
sides.
Certainly it wasn't a one-way street, with BSD-isms
being injected into a USG system or vice versa.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Thanks, Norman. This clarify a lot my confusion about SysV.
I'm reading the J. Lions Commentary to V6 UNIX, the ancestor of all
UNIXes, including SysV (if I understood correctly). The last Research
Unix release was Tenth Edition Unix. Is the source code of
releases 8, 9 and 10 available? Are there other commentaries of ancient
Research Unixes, like Lions book?
Thanks,
--Michele
P.S. to Cyrille: Again, my apologies for the confusion. I realized my
mistake just after I sent the mail. I'm really sorry!
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