[TUHS] Codata restoration - day 1

[Erik Fair]

On Oct 10, 2014, at 12:55, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> I was glad to see the end of the WICATs, because their attempt at System 
> III was woeful; I had to do pre-sales demos, *knowing* that the damned 
> thing would crash on me, and got very good at excuses.  "Sorry guys, we've 
> been having a bit of trouble with this new controller, but we're told 
> it'll be fixed Real Soon Now(tm)" when I knew that it was the poxy OS at 
> fault.  How do you explain to the customer that the OS itself is 
> fundamentally rat-shit?

At Dual Systems, we never shipped AT&T USG System III to our customers, other than a few alphas/betas - it was such a disaster, we spent a year fixing show-stopper bugs in it. By the time we got System III into what we considered "shippable/supportable" shape, System V was out, so we started work on that. Our customers had to jump from v7 to System V, but they were spared System III.

System V was pretty awful too, but it was "industry standard" and we had to put up with that idiocy from AT&T USG. I daily retreated back to the much more pleasant use of BSD UNIX systems at UCB that I still had access to.

	Erik <fair at netbsd.org>