[TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 07:46:33PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> 
> 
> > On May 11, 2022, at 10:35 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant,
> 
> As good a time as any to thank you for this.  Pity you couldn't convince them to put the POSIX sh in /bin/sh and the old sh in /usr/compat or some such, rather than having POSIX only in /usr/xpg4.

I was pretty green, it was my 3rd job after grad school.  I didn't have
pull at the time, I was a nobody who had to prove himself.

Sun was pretty BSD centric at the time, it was more or less a bug fixed
BSD with a well designed and well implemented replacement VM system.

The POSIX stuff had a definite System V feel to it, and in some places,
for the better.  It felt like POSIX cleaned up signal semantics (I know,
ASTs are better) and sorted out a bunch of differences between the
various vendors.  But Sun was not all in on POSIX, they were doing it
because they had to.  I was there as a contractor because none of the
rank and file wanted anything to do with it.

Whatever, doing that work was an education about all the code paths in
the kernel, in retrospect I would have paid my entire college tuition
to be forced to do that work.  I learned a _lot_.

This is sort of neither here nore there, but credit where credit is due.
I enjoyed working with Don Cragun, Sun's rep to the POSIX meetings.
Very soft spoken guy, but very detail oriented.  When Don said "do this"
I did what he said.

--lm