[TUHS] Favorite UNIX

[Kevin Bowling]

I have the requisite hardware and media so I will give it a shake so I
can talk with you about it some time.

Auspex.. I have a story there believe it or not.  Tore one apart at an
electronic junkyard I worked at part time in my teens.  But I got it
booted up enough to test everything and sell as they wanted.  The
hardware was very cool.  I didn't know enough back then to evaluate
the software.  I murdered a ton of interesting computers there sadly.
Still searching for salvation :D

Regards,

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 8:28 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 07:58:59PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>> What is your favorite UNIX.  Three possible categories, choose one or more:
>> 1) Free
>> 2) Forced to use a commercial platform.  I guess that could include
>> macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
>> 3) Historical
>
> SunOS 4.1.3  Oh, man, how I wish that all of Unix today were based
> on that.  If you like FreeBSD you would love that kernel.  It's BSD
> for sure but then carefully moved forward into an excellent VM system,
> a virtualized the file system with the vnode stuff, it cared about
> the right picture.  And all the bugs fixed.
>
> I've worked in lots of other kernel source bases.  They all sucked in
> comparison.  Including Solaris, fuck that shit, Bryan will yell at me
> but Solaris sucked.  Yeah, they made it useful with all the work they
> did but it was never "home" and I think that even the people that worked
> on it get that.  Or not, it was never home for me.
>
> SunOS had so much love and so much carefulness poured into it.  And I
> can't claim any credit, it was the people who came before me, Rusty, Rob,
> Joe, Steve, those guys did the work that made me see the architecture
> that they left for me to see.
>
> Guy Harris worked on it, he left right around the time I joined, I think
> he went to Auspex (sp?) but he would come back and pound on the door
> to building 5 at around 6 or 7pm.  Pope or I would go down and let him
> in and he'd find a machine and look at the source and start screaming
> about why haven't they fixed this bug?  And he'd just fix it.  He didn't
> work here and he fixed bugs.  I get it, it took me years after I left
> Sun to stop saying "we" when we were talking about Sun.
>
> The level of love, as measured by the amount of time we all spent to make
> it better, was over the top.  And it was because of the super stars who
> showed us what an OS could be.
>
> Today?  Favorite?   Grumble.  It's sort of shitty.  Linux is the obvious
> winner but is it what I like?  It's what I run.  Have to give it credit.
> It is pretty good.  I'd prefer to be running a SunOS derived OS.