Oh, that reminded me of SunOS 4.0 that introduced streams. Broke

So I used to pine for 3.5!

Agree re 2.4/2.5.1 having gotten an O/S back to being solid and very usable -- IIRC we had customers query whether they had good distribution media, because the "patch" directory was empty. No patches were introduced during beta.

On Tue, 4 Jan 2022, 07:38 Adam Thornton, <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

2.5.1 was the first Solaris that didn't often make me scream that I wanted SunOS 4.1 back.

Adam

On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 4:32 PM Doug McIntyre <merlyn@geeks.org> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 03, 2022 at 04:15:08PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 3:23 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> > Yeah, to be fair, by the time Solaris 2.3 or 2.4 came around, it was
> > mostly up to par. (Or maybe it was because Moore's law meant that we
> > didn't care any more. :-)
>
> I have some vague memories that we had to do something like double the
> RAM in our SPARCstations to make Solaris 2 feel comfortable. At the
> time, that was a pretty serious outlay in an academic department.
> 2.5.1 felt like the first version that was _truly_ usable.

I'd agree, 2.4 was pretty slow and chunky, 2.5 was alright, but 2.5.1 was quite usable and stable.
Also by this time, the hardware was going in directions that SunOS wouldn't keep up with.