[TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

[Jon Steinhart]

Larry McVoy writes:
> On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 12:45:13PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > power to kill NeWS.  One of the leaders of this was Apollo, and according
> > to folks that I knew there, they felt that their networking was better
> > than Sun's, but they lost because Sun "gave away" NFS.  
>
> Small hijack because I couldn't help it :)
>
> As someone who has used Apollos side by side with Suns (this was before
> I went to work at Sun, around 1987), to say Apollos were better at
> anything than a Sun was a joke in bad taste.  If I remember correctly,
> they were both based on 68020s, so same baseline.  Apollos just sucked,
> their networked file system was slow as molasses.  In spite of having
> dozens of Apollos available to me, and just one Sun file server, the first
> thing I did at that job was to port the cross compiler from Apollo to Sun,
> that one machine was faster than anything I could get done on a pile of
> Apollos.  I hated them.
>
> --lm

So I never liked Apollos much.  What I was referring to was Apollo's claim
that their token-ring network performed better for large numbers of nodes.
And they were correct.  However, they didn't consider the eventually
invention of switches that solved the problem.

Jon