[TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Earl Baugh]

Just FYI - I have a Sun 3/110 that I still fire up.  I’d be interested in the 4.X source ( I believe it still ran on it - I have 3.2 on it now ) to be able to patch a few things to keep it going. 

I’ve not looked for it, as I didn’t think it was readily available. 

Earl 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 2, 2021, at 10:25 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 12:50:20PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>> 
>>> SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and is
>>> basically under one big lock for SMP.  It was a huge amount of work to get
>>> that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the hat layer
>>> from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work).
>> 
>> SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the
>> decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits
>> were in charge instead of the real workers.
> 
> A little known story is that Scooter did the deal with AT&T because Sun
> was in trouble financially.  As I remember AT&T bought $200M of Sun stock
> at 35% over market but the price was we had to dump SunOS and go to SVr4.
> 
> I worked for Ken Okin at the time, senior VP of all server hardware.
> Ken paid me to argue with the execs for 6 months to try and reverse this
> decision so Ken didn't know the details either.
> 
> SunOS 4.x was the bees knees, it was the most well thought out Unix ever.
> I got there around 4.1 or just past 4.0 and I didn't know shit.  They made
> me do POSIX conformance which made me go through every code path.  Nothing,
> nothing, nothing, and one day it was like the fog cleared and I saw what
> they were trying to say.  And it was pretty cool, SunOS 4.x was pretty
> object oriented without all the nonsense, just the good stuff.  SunOS was
> the only Unix that just made sense, I could guess what the kernel would
> do and 90% of the time I guessed right.  I miss it.
> 
> That said, Sun never made that OS SMP.  Real SMP.  Warner says Solbourne
> did, I'd still like to, or get Dock Williams or Anil, to talk to the people
> that made the VM system scale.
> 
> --lm