From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: jon@fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart) Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2017 14:21:20 -0700 Subject: Favorite UNIX In-Reply-To: References: <20171001175106.5FE3318C0A6@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <201710012121.v91LLKHK004998@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Steve Mynott writes: > On 1 October 2017 at 18:51, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > > Why was Solaris so much worse than SunOS? > > Probably because it was so much more buggy on release and people were > more used to BSD and didn't like change and the fact that greedy Sun > had removed the compiler. Solaris 2.3 had core dumps from base > binaries everywhere where SunOS 4.1.3 seemed quite stable. I think that the root cause is AT&T USL. When UNIX went from research to "product" different people worked on it. And those people seemed to lack the artistry, vision, and craftsmanship of the original developers. AT&T pushed their SVR4 crud hard onto the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the folks at Berkeley produced code more in the original tradition possibly because of Ken taking a sabbatical year to teach there. SunOS was the result of the pipeline between Berkeley and Sun. Solaris was the result of Sun abandoning the Berkeley branch for the USL branch.