From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: kevin.bowling@kev009.com (Kevin Bowling) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:36:25 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Favorite UNIX In-Reply-To: <20170929032828.GN28606@mcvoy.com> References: <20170929032828.GN28606@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: I have the requisite hardware and media so I will give it a shake so I can talk with you about it some time. Auspex.. I have a story there believe it or not. Tore one apart at an electronic junkyard I worked at part time in my teens. But I got it booted up enough to test everything and sell as they wanted. The hardware was very cool. I didn't know enough back then to evaluate the software. I murdered a ton of interesting computers there sadly. Still searching for salvation :D Regards, On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 8:28 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 07:58:59PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote: >> What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible categories, choose one or more: >> 1) Free >> 2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include >> macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT. >> 3) Historical > > SunOS 4.1.3 Oh, man, how I wish that all of Unix today were based > on that. If you like FreeBSD you would love that kernel. It's BSD > for sure but then carefully moved forward into an excellent VM system, > a virtualized the file system with the vnode stuff, it cared about > the right picture. And all the bugs fixed. > > I've worked in lots of other kernel source bases. They all sucked in > comparison. Including Solaris, fuck that shit, Bryan will yell at me > but Solaris sucked. Yeah, they made it useful with all the work they > did but it was never "home" and I think that even the people that worked > on it get that. Or not, it was never home for me. > > SunOS had so much love and so much carefulness poured into it. And I > can't claim any credit, it was the people who came before me, Rusty, Rob, > Joe, Steve, those guys did the work that made me see the architecture > that they left for me to see. > > Guy Harris worked on it, he left right around the time I joined, I think > he went to Auspex (sp?) but he would come back and pound on the door > to building 5 at around 6 or 7pm. Pope or I would go down and let him > in and he'd find a machine and look at the source and start screaming > about why haven't they fixed this bug? And he'd just fix it. He didn't > work here and he fixed bugs. I get it, it took me years after I left > Sun to stop saying "we" when we were talking about Sun. > > The level of love, as measured by the amount of time we all spent to make > it better, was over the top. And it was because of the super stars who > showed us what an OS could be. > > Today? Favorite? Grumble. It's sort of shitty. Linux is the obvious > winner but is it what I like? It's what I run. Have to give it credit. > It is pretty good. I'd prefer to be running a SunOS derived OS.