Favorite UNIX

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 11:51:30AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> >If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my favorite release, lot of
> >Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of late
> >night hacking by people who cared).
> 
> Agreed; it was my favourite SunOS.  Never got to use 4.1.4, as $BOSS decided
> to switch to Slowaris instead (that's where the applications were).

I think 4.1.4 had Greg Limes herculean effort to make the VM system
scale on multiprocessors.  So it might be worth a look.

Yeah, at that time everyone was pushed to Solaris.  Here's another Larry
story for ya.

I created this weird ass NFS server that was a cluster.  I sort of
cheated but sort of did not.  It ran really fast, it used one of the
first ethernet switches (a modified Kalpana, the mods were VLANs, I
thought I invented that but apparently somebody beat me to it).  I did
the development on my beloved SunOS 4.x but Scooter insisted that it
ship with Solaris.

So I'm at the Moscone center, some tech/geek thing, I'm pitching this
product.  It was a technical pitch, I'm an engineer, so it was mostly
geeks in the room.

There is some dude in the room who keeps railing on Solaris.  I'm trying
to be a good soldier and say that Solaris is the future, yada yada.
This guy keeps going on and on about how much Solaris sucks and couldn't
he have this system with SunOS.

I finally lose it, like really lose it, and say "I know, I know, Solaris
sucks, you should see what this system does with SunOS, I fucking hate
Solaris".

It was all captured on tape.  My boss, Ken Okin, VP of all server hardware
at Sun, said "Find that tape and destroy it".  So I did.

Fun times?  I guess?  Welcome to the real world, it's not all about what
the geeks want.  When it is, wallow in that, it doesn't happen that often.

--lm