On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 2:54 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

You're probably right but it wouldn't have mattered. SunOS was very popular
and had a good VM system with a working mmap. Once it became official
AT&T source everyone would have moved to it over time.

But Sun would have to accept the economics of Intel processor sooner. Which is funny because RoadRunner was a pretty neat machine. They had Solaris/386 but was way too little too late. Sparc was a blind spot I fear.

Sort of obvious in retrospect. Nobody, that I know of, considered it at the time.

Maybe -- as I said, i386 would have been the key.

I proposed open sourcing it.

I agree, that might have worked. And then if they wanted to be in the HW biz, let the FOSS world deal with Intel.