From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: erc@pobox.com (Ed Carp) Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2017 06:24:30 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines In-Reply-To: <20170104033512.GA22116@mcvoy.com> References: <20170104024127.GN12264@mcvoy.com> <20170104033512.GA22116@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: That's a good question. I was working for Sun at the time, and no one I know was in favor of the switch - all we knew was that Scott McNealy was cramming it down the throats of both Sun and Suns customers (or that was the perception, anyway). I think they lost a lot of customers because of that. On 1/3/17, Larry McVoy wrote: > 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 >