From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: lm@bitmover.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:26:57 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] SVR4 x86 -- Sources
In-Reply-To: <1310483478.7906.14.camel@localhost.localdomain>
References: <1310483478.7906.14.camel@localhost.localdomain>
Message-ID: <20110712232657.GB31526@bitmover.com>

"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:
> > 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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> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com