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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!nntp-hub2.barrnet.net!nntp-sc.barrnet.net!netapp.com!netapp.com!not-for-mail From: guy@netapp.com (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.aix,comp.unix.advocacy Subject: The Old SunOS 4.x/Solaris 1.y vs. SunOS 5.x/Solaris 2.x war Followup-To: comp.unix.advocacy Date: 17 Jan 1996 23:06:46 -0800 Organization: Network Appliance Lines: 42 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <4dkri6$eoc@bayonne.netapp.com> References: <4cmopu$d35@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <4de378$2rl@durban.vector.co.za> <4ded2e$6nh@park.uvsc.edu> <bryDL9DEF.B0v@netcom.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.9.200.18 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:1902 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:2046 comp.unix.solaris:56947 comp.unix.aix:68487 comp.unix.advocacy:13062 (Followups to "comp.unix.advocacy".) Bryan Althaus <bry@netcom.com> wrote: >AT&T System V Release 4 was going to be released no mater what. AT&T >sub-contracted Sun to help work on SVR4. SVR4 which was to be the >final coming together of all UNIX's, BSD, SYSV, SunOS 4.x & Xenix. Forget >that OSF was formed and that it was so great that IBM went back to its AIX >as if it never heard of OSF/1 not to mention HP. Digital, well... > >After AT&T & Sun have completed the work, Sun is suppose turn around and >then derive their new OS from SunOS 4.1.x???? I think what people are arguing isn't that Sun should've backed out of the SVR4 deal. I suspect what they're arguing is that Sun shouldn't have gotten involved in the SVR4 deal in the first place, and based SunOS 5.x on SunOS 4.x (although you still might well have seen even more SVisms in 5.x than you saw in 4.x) rather than SVR4. At least one mangler^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmanager at Sun, back when the SVR4 deal was being discussed, insisted that business simply wouldn't buy Suns unless they had an OS with the UNIX System V name on it and, when I noted that HP-UX may have been SV-flavored but its kernel was, as far as I know, BSD-derived (but made SV-compatible), he insisted that HP was going to dump HP-UX and go with a kernel derived straight from SV code. When I asked somebody at *HP* about this, he said that HP had no such plans. In retrospect, of course, none of this came out the way AT&T or Sun appeared to think it would. SVR4 and SPARC didn't completely take over the UNIX industry; AT&T never even came out with SPARC-based machines, and eventually sold UNIX off. OPEN LOOK didn't take over, either, and AT&T^H^H^H^HNovell and Sun eventually gave up on it. The same goes for NeWS.... A case can probably be made that the SVR4 deal *was* a mistake, although the differences between SunOS 4.x and 5.x are more than just "BSD vs. System V", and SunOS 5.x might well still have been quite different from 4.x, in many of the ways the 5.x in this universe is different from 4.x, although probably less so than the one in this universe is. Not having to deal with the 4.x-to-SVR4 transition might have removed some hurdles to making 5.x, though, so that universe's 5.x might have come out sooner, and been fast enough and reliable enough earlier.