*BSD News Article 59524


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.aix
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From: bet@ritz.mordor.com (Bennett Todd)
Subject: Re: ISP hardware/software choices (performance comparison)
Distribution: inet
Organization: Mordor International - Jersey City, NJ
Message-ID: <DL3Bv8.22H@ritz.mordor.com>
References: <4cmopu$d35@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> <4cv8j1$59k@park.uvsc.edu> <4d37d4$j0l@gremlin.backfire.mn.org> <DL29Az.Ax2@ftel.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 22:59:32 GMT
Lines: 32
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:1934 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:2079 comp.unix.solaris:57141 comp.unix.aix:68638

>I am also heartily amused that the ``SunOS 4 is marvellous, what's this
>5 crap?'' arguments are word for word identical to the abuse heaped on
>SunOS 4 relative to SunOS 3.

Sure are. A Sun 3/50 (16MHz 68020, video framebuffer on the memory bus, 4MB
RAM non-expandable) running SunOS 3.5 was a whole lot more responsive and
pleasant than a Sparcstation 2 running SunOS 4.0.1. By 4.1.3_U1b, Sun had
gotten SunOS 4.x nearly as stable as SunOS 3.x had been, and everyone was
running it on SS-5 and faster boxes with 64MB or more of memory. Then it
didn't feel quite so awful.

By 2.5 Sun seems to have made Solaris 2 nearly as useable as SunOS 4.x was 5
years ago. As long as you've got an SS-20 with 128MB of memory to run it on,
it plods along OK (assuming you aren't masochistic enough to run CDE; that
crawls dog-slow even on a top-end box).

So yeah, 2.5 is OK, I can live with it; like any other non-standard,
ill-maintained OS, I load all the GNU SW into /usr/local/bin, put that at
the front of my path, and it doesn't hurt too badly. And some things are
nicer than SunOS 4.x. Of course these things, like System V init, shadow
passwords, etc can be hacked in to 4.x in reasonable time. It's a criminal
shame that they abandoned a good OS for a foul one; they've pissed away many
years, and still have loads of awful problems.

Just think; if sun had stuck with a good OS (SunOS 3) when they had it, they
could be shipping something as nice as FreeBSD now. It's a real shame.


-- 
-Bennett
bet@mordor.com
<URL:http://www.mordor.com/bet/>