[TUHS] the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[William Pechter]

Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 11:36:27AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Tue, 3 Jan 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>
>>> I really wonder what the world would look like right now if Sun had open 
>>> sourced SunOS 4.x and put energy behind it. [...]
>> My guess is it would be a lot like FreeBSD.
> Not really.  FreeBSD is open source and was way way behind SunOS.  That's
> why so many Sun engineers were hugely butthurt when they were forced onto
> a far inferior System V source base.  Scooter just didn't understand
> how much polish had gone into SunOS 4.x.  It was a very talented group
> of engineers, many of whom had no social life (he says looking in the
> mirror :) so they poured all their energy into making SunOS great.
>
> I'm biased because I worked there, but I've run code on all of the major
> Unix offerings (AIX, IRIX, Ultrex, HP-UX and SunOS) and SunOS was hands
> down a better experience, inside the kernel, as a user of the syscalls,
> and in user space.  It's what a geeky engineer would want with the polish
> needed to allow customers to have a good experience.
>
> I think a free SunOS would have had a cult following.  I'd still be working
> on it.  Sun's management just didn't realize what they were throwing away.
>
> Whimper.
Where would the current FreeBSD be if you compared it with SunOS4?

Bill