Favorite UNIX

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 02:21:20PM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> 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.

+1 couldn't have put it better.
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm