From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: pechter@gmail.com (William Pechter) Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2017 19:50:27 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines In-Reply-To: <20170105004353.GB6931@mcvoy.com> References: <20170104024127.GN12264@mcvoy.com> <20170104033512.GA22116@mcvoy.com> <20170105004353.GB6931@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <4c14e37a-f959-d625-b877-f498a644415c@gmail.com> Larry McVoy wrote: > On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 11:36:27AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: >> On Tue, 3 Jan 2017, Larry McVoy wrote: >> >>> I really wonder what the world would look like right now if Sun had open >>> sourced SunOS 4.x and put energy behind it. [...] >> My guess is it would be a lot like FreeBSD. > Not really. FreeBSD is open source and was way way behind SunOS. That's > why so many Sun engineers were hugely butthurt when they were forced onto > a far inferior System V source base. Scooter just didn't understand > how much polish had gone into SunOS 4.x. It was a very talented group > of engineers, many of whom had no social life (he says looking in the > mirror :) so they poured all their energy into making SunOS great. > > I'm biased because I worked there, but I've run code on all of the major > Unix offerings (AIX, IRIX, Ultrex, HP-UX and SunOS) and SunOS was hands > down a better experience, inside the kernel, as a user of the syscalls, > and in user space. It's what a geeky engineer would want with the polish > needed to allow customers to have a good experience. > > I think a free SunOS would have had a cult following. I'd still be working > on it. Sun's management just didn't realize what they were throwing away. > > Whimper. Where would the current FreeBSD be if you compared it with SunOS4? Bill