The term I heard to describe Unix USL was “Turkey Farm”. And there was something about “Stewing in their own juices for too long”. Sounds delicious! 

-Don


> On 1 Oct 2017, at 23:21, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> Steve Mynott writes:
>> On 1 October 2017 at 18:51, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> 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.