On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 2:54 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> You're probably right but it wouldn't have mattered. SunOS was very popular
> and had a good VM system with a working mmap.  Once it became official
> AT&T source everyone would have moved to it over time.
>
But Sun would have to accept the economics of Intel processor sooner.
Which is funny because RoadRunner was a pretty neat machine.  They had
Solaris/386 but was way too little too late.   Sparc was a blind spot I
fear.



>
> Sort of obvious in retrospect.  Nobody, that I know of, considered it at the
> time.

Maybe -- as I said, i386 would have been the key.



> I proposed open sourcing it.

I agree, that might have worked.  And then if they wanted to be in the HW
biz, let the FOSS world deal with Intel.