From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2017 19:35:12 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines In-Reply-To: References: <20170104024127.GN12264@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20170104033512.GA22116@mcvoy.com> On Tue, Jan 03, 2017 at 10:23:28PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 10:00 PM, Warner Losh wrote: > > > On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 7:41 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > I was in building 5 at Sun when they were switching to SVr4 which became > > > Solaris 2.0 (I think). > > > > Solaris 2.0 was the first SVr4 version of Solaris. 4.1.{1,2,3} were > > still BSD based, and Solaris 2.0 was SunOS 5.0 and OpenWindows. > > > > My favorite version number was SunOS 4.1.4U1: I was told that the ``U1'' > meant, "you won", as in "you won. Here's another BSD-based release." That might have been the Greg Limes release. I may be all wrong but someone, I think it was Greg, busted their ass to try and make SunOS 4.x scale up on SMP machines. There were a lot of us at the time that hated the SVr4 thing, it was such a huge step backwards. I dunno how much you care about Sun history, but SunOS, the BSD based stuff before 5.0, the engineers and the customers *loved* it. I was not the first guy who worked until midnight on that OS, I wasn't even on the radar screen. Guy Harris worked on it, tons of people worked on it, tons of people poured their heart and soul into it. It crushed us when they went to SVr4, that shit sucked. My boss, Ken Okin, paid me for 6 months to go fight management to stop the switch to SVr4. It was more than a decade later that I learned that the reason for the switch was that Sun was out of money and AT&T bought $200M of Sun stock at 35% over market but the deal was no more SunOS, it had to be SVr4. I really wonder what the world would look like right now if Sun had open sourced SunOS 4.x and put energy behind it. I wrote a paper about it, I still wonder. http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/srcos.html