Inside AT&T (but outside research) there was considerable pressure to use AT&T products (3B, System V, BLIT/5620, Datakit) rather than the externally developing Sun/Ethernet/TCP suite, especially in the mid-late 1980s. We all (mostly) hated them and wanted Suns, but we were told "eat your own dog food." The 3B20 and 3B5 were awful, but the 3B2 had potential. Once we got a working TCP/IP network in Bell Labs the tide turned in favor of Suns.
On 08/24/2018 09:06 AM, Clem Cole wrote:...I've begun to wonder whether 3B2 hardware was used very much inside of Bell Labs.I'd be curious to hear of people that actually used it. AT&T forced you to buy one with SVR3 as the porting base (I'd have never had bought the one we had a Stellar otherwise).The only time I ever knew anyone run one, was to check to see the behavior of some code/validation testing of RFS etc...