Even at that time (2000), Sun was already working on -or soon would be- all of these and other things that have enormous impact on the industry: - ZFS - DT

Even at that time (2000), Sun was already working on -or soon would be- all of these and other things that have enormous impact on the industry: - ZFS - DTrace - SMF (think systemd done right, though SMF has its issues) - FMA I remember Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, and others at Sun screaming up and down that there was a ton of innovation left to do in operating systems. They were absolutely right. In some sense, ZFS and DTrace were applications of old ideas, but boy were they done well. ZFS is BSD4.4's log-structured filesystem done right and better. DTrace is applying the dictum from database land of aggregating statistics as close to the source as possible. They could just have been papers, I guess, but they chose to make an impact by writing code. Why write papers first then code when you can write code first and papers later? Academia mostly only pays for papers, so you don't get that much code out of academia. The private sector mostly only pays for code, so you don't get that many papers out of the private sector.