Re: Favorite UNIX

On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 01:51:06PM -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote: Because SunOS had years of polish. It was a nicer starting point (BSD had all the fun stuff, AT&T was sort of a stuffed shirt's Unix, BSD was Unix for hackers) and the engineers who polished it did so because they loved it. Lots of us stayed late into the night working on that OS and it showed. It was fun times, McNealy knew we were working on it and he'd come over to the kernel team's building and egg us on. He'd get up on the conference table and preach to us how it was going to rule the world. No, the deal was that Sun needed money and AT&T bought $200M of Sun stock at 35% over market. In exchange, Sun agreed to take SVR4 and make it popular. At&T wanted SVR4 to be the next SunOS. But that was a kick in the nuts to us engineers. The sytem v source base was crap compared to sunos, a huge step backwards. So my crowd pretty much all left in disgust. There was a lot of heartache over it. None of us knew about the business deal at the time, in fact I think a lot of management didn't know. I pushed for a free version of SunOS 4.x. I removed the STREAMS code and the drivers because that wasn't free; put back the BSD tty drivers and I had an unencumbered source base. I demo-ed it. My boss, Ken Okin, VP of server hardware, paid me to argue for that for 6 months (which is why I say I don't think management knew about the deal; Ken was a senior dude, he wouldn't have sent me off if he knew for sure I was going to fail). I wrote a paper arguing for this: http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/freeos.pdf but it never happened. We'd all be running SunOS today if they had done that. Instead, they repeated the SunOS journey. Bryan and crew polished that turd for years and got it sort of reasonable. Some people grew to like it, I never did. Too system v-ish for my tastes. You have to install the GNU tools to have a reasonable tool chain, they never fixed the default tools. That's crazy, why ship them and maintain them if you aren't using them? Solaris has always felt weird to me, but they went for it and got it better. Only to have it tossed away again. Yuck.