I remember being brought in to operationalize the first version of Norton Anti-Virus for Internet E-mail Gateways (NAVIEG) that would run on Solaris (this was i

I remember being brought in to operationalize the first version of Norton Anti-Virus for Internet E-mail Gateways (NAVIEG) that would run on Solaris (this was in 1996). It was outsourced to an Indian company because no one in Symantec understood the first thing about programming on Unix. Turns out that the guys in India didn't understand programming on Unix, either. The Indian developers basically just transliterated the Windows code to Unix, and got it to compile. Then they shipped it. That's when the real problems started, and I was brought in. Now, I've never claimed to be a developer. At the time, I was a consultant and Unix sysadmin, but the concept of "DevOps" had yet to be born. What I could tell them was that, in 1996, basing your Unix implementation on Solaris 2.5 (not even Solaris 2.5.1) was a bad idea, because there was a whole host of things wrong with that ancient version of Solaris, and if they wanted to be on that platform then they needed to be on a much more modern version. Secondly, threading on Unix at that time was ... problematic ... and that was true even on the most modern versions of Unix that were available at the time. Multi-process programming worked well, however. On Windows, the reverse was apparently true. So, naturally the outsourcing developers used threading, and they used threading on an ancient version of Unix that had about the worst possible implementation of threading. Oy. Of course, learning these things at this stage didn't help Symantec. They had already outsourced their aircraft and gotten an Albatross back in return. I did help them develop a testing regime that could relatively accurately simulate a real-world distribution of mail message sizes and types, with a real-world distribution of supposedly infected messages, and then beat the holy living crap out of the server trying to push that volume through as quickly as possible. And I did get called back to teach a class on Unix to the lead QA team in Denver, so that they could try to support NAVIEG on Solaris 2.5. But so far as I know, the consulting company I worked for never got called back to help them actually fix their design problems with the code, and I think that project probably died a pretty quick and vicious death. Also, so far as I know, no one at Symantec ever again tried to develop or support any code that would run on any flavor of Unix or Unix-like OS.