12 Sep
2017
12 Sep
'17
5:09 a.m.
On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 09:49:16AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Paul Winalski writes:
And don't underestimate the draw of a BSD that was "fixed", had mmap that
worked, unified page cache, VFS layer that was pleasant. I worked for
Lachman before I worked for Sun, saw the guts of quite a few Unix OS's.
SunOS was by *far* the most pleasant and well thought out. It was an
OS where you could predict what it would do based on the architecture
and sure enough, that's what it did.
I miss that source base.
SUN captured the workstation market from Apollo
and DEC because they
managed to sell workstations cheaper than their competitors. I don't
think that the OS being UNIX had very much to do with it. But using
UNIX probably lowered SUN's software development costs, and no doubt
that contributed to their lower workstation cost.
While the choice of UNIX may have played a small part, Sun really nailed
it with the SparcStation I. Sure, they sold it for less than whatever
the DEC equivalent was at the time, but that's because their manufacturing
cost was way less. The SparcStation I pioneered a lot of new manufacturing
technology; it was the first snap-together system. I remember looking at
a tear-down of the DEC and Sun offerings, and the Sun had less than 10% of
the parts of the equivalent DEC system. Methinks that better engineering
won the day.