From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2017 16:09:10 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs dec/apollo ] In-Reply-To: <201709111649.v8BGnGTx005812@darkstar.fourwinds.com> References: <201709111649.v8BGnGTx005812@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: <20170911230910.GH7819@mcvoy.com> On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 09:49:16AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote: > Paul Winalski writes: > > SUN captured the workstation market from Apollo and DEC because they > > managed to sell workstations cheaper than their competitors. I don't > > think that the OS being UNIX had very much to do with it. But using > > UNIX probably lowered SUN's software development costs, and no doubt > > that contributed to their lower workstation cost. > > While the choice of UNIX may have played a small part, Sun really nailed > it with the SparcStation I. Sure, they sold it for less than whatever > the DEC equivalent was at the time, but that's because their manufacturing > cost was way less. The SparcStation I pioneered a lot of new manufacturing > technology; it was the first snap-together system. I remember looking at > a tear-down of the DEC and Sun offerings, and the Sun had less than 10% of > the parts of the equivalent DEC system. Methinks that better engineering > won the day. And don't underestimate the draw of a BSD that was "fixed", had mmap that worked, unified page cache, VFS layer that was pleasant. I worked for Lachman before I worked for Sun, saw the guts of quite a few Unix OS's. SunOS was by *far* the most pleasant and well thought out. It was an OS where you could predict what it would do based on the architecture and sure enough, that's what it did. I miss that source base.