Favorite UNIX

[Jon Steinhart]

Steve Mynott writes:
> On 1 October 2017 at 18:51, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Why was Solaris so much worse than SunOS?
> 
> Probably because it was so much more buggy on release and people were
> more used to BSD and didn't like change and the fact that greedy Sun
> had removed the compiler. Solaris 2.3 had core dumps from base
> binaries everywhere where SunOS 4.1.3 seemed quite stable.

I think that the root cause is AT&T USL.  When UNIX went from research
to "product" different people worked on it.  And those people seemed to
lack the artistry, vision, and craftsmanship of the original developers.
AT&T pushed their SVR4 crud hard onto the rest of the world.  Meanwhile,
the folks at Berkeley produced code more in the original tradition
possibly because of Ken taking a sabbatical year to teach there.  SunOS
was the result of the pipeline between Berkeley and Sun.

Solaris was the result of Sun abandoning the Berkeley branch for the USL
branch.