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I recall the brouhaha that erupted around Sun's move from a BSD foundation to System V. I've always felt it was a downgrade.

panick21_ 3y ago
This was the moment many former Sun people identify as the 'death of original Sun'. Sun wanted to make SMP work, so Solaris was a huge amount of work and was incredibly buggy for a long time. Sun effectively lost a huge amount of time going threw this transition and it took years to be back to the same amount of stability. Bryan Cantril talkes about this in LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos [1] But not everybody agree, if you read 'Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems' that was written in 1991, they are very pro the AT&T deal and explicitly call out the BSD people as 'anti-Standard' and thus anti-Sun. The real difference there is the argument about what a Standard is. Their approach is basically Unix belongs to AT&T and therefore they are the standard. While the (in my opinion) more correct argument was that BSD/Sun had the most software and they were the defacto standard and being more open, continuing be the standard was what Sun should have done. Another incredibly important battle was over X vs NeWS. NeWS was arguably technically superior. There is a nice talk by James Gosling about it [2]. It still had technical problems but it would have been a great base to build off. But because some companies, lead by Dec made X open(ish) and many embraced it, X became 'the standard' and thus many at Sun basically said 'Well X is the standard, so therefore we have to switch to X'. Instead of saying, lets make NeWS open and try to be the Standard. The Sun transition also hurt their costumers. In "LIFE UNDER THE SUN: My 20-Year Journey at Sun Microsystems" David Yen mentions costumers bitterly complaining about it. They made the transition very, very aggressively basically telling costumers to STFU. David Yen loved the aggressive approach because he was selling massive SMP servers that need Solaris. SMP servers where clearly where Sun saw the future. If Sun had embraced BSD, open sourced NeWS and made the SMP transition in the open, Unix might have gone into the 90s being an unstable juggernaut. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA
freeremote 3y ago
I was a Solaris admin in those days. No one was impressed with the changes. I still, even after all these years, recall the BSD command differences. For whatever reason, I still sometimes enter a random BSDism command on the Linux command line and then say, "Ooops, wrong command. I cannot believe I did that." Especially since I've run Debian stable for the better part of 20 years on and off with attempts to like other distros like Fedora or Arch. Still working in IT closing in on 60 years of age. Still love being a sysadmin. Still love writing shell scripts and automating things.
korginator 3y ago
I used to work with the Sun 3's, SparcStations and other Sun hardware at the time when they were transitioning from the BSD flavoured SunOS to Solaris. There was confusion at many levels including branding. The SysV flavour was initially called SunOS 5, not Solaris. Later they decided to use the Solaris name for later SunOS releases and drop the SunOS name altogether. There was some confusion about the Solaris 1.x vs 2.x naming, since Solaris 1.x was really the BSD flavoured SunOS, while Solaris 2.x was a completely different beast, being all SVR4. What first struck me when we moved from SunOS to Solaris was just how clean and simple SunOS was to manage, from the directory structure to the /etc configurations to device file names. Yes, there were different ways in Solaris to address the disk block device (physical, logical, etc.) but it always made me cringe that something I'd addressed as '/dev/sd0a' now became something like '/devices/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000/sd@0,0:a', or at best '/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0'. The /etc/ filesystem hierarchy also got a lot more complicated. I felt the SVR4 Solaris was far less elegant than SunOS. Guess it was also because of the relative maturity of SunOS, but I felt things just worked as expected and the OS itself was generally snappier than SVR4/Solaris on the same Sparc hardware. Eventually we had no choice but to move to SVR4/Solaris but I still have fond memories of a simpler time and a cleaner SunOS.
- hulitu 3y ago
  They still called Solaris SunOS. AFAIR Solaris 8 was named (in uname's output) SunOS 5.8.

panick21_ 3y ago

This was the moment many former Sun people identify as the 'death of original Sun'. Sun wanted to make SMP work, so Solaris was a huge amount of work and was incredibly buggy for a long time. Sun effectively lost a huge amount of time going threw this transition and it took years to be back to the same amount of stability. Bryan Cantril talkes about this in LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos [1] But not everybody agree, if you read 'Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems' that was written in 1991, they are very pro the AT&T deal and explicitly call out the BSD people as 'anti-Standard' and thus anti-Sun. The real difference there is the argument about what a Standard is. Their approach is basically Unix belongs to AT&T and therefore they are the standard. While the (in my opinion) more correct argument was that BSD/Sun had the most software and they were the defacto standard and being more open, continuing be the standard was what Sun should have done. Another incredibly important battle was over X vs NeWS. NeWS was arguably technically superior. There is a nice talk by James Gosling about it [2]. It still had technical problems but it would have been a great base to build off. But because some companies, lead by Dec made X open(ish) and many embraced it, X became 'the standard' and thus many at Sun basically said 'Well X is the standard, so therefore we have to switch to X'. Instead of saying, lets make NeWS open and try to be the Standard. The Sun transition also hurt their costumers. In "LIFE UNDER THE SUN: My 20-Year Journey at Sun Microsystems" David Yen mentions costumers bitterly complaining about it. They made the transition very, very aggressively basically telling costumers to STFU. David Yen loved the aggressive approach because he was selling massive SMP servers that need Solaris. SMP servers where clearly where Sun saw the future. If Sun had embraced BSD, open sourced NeWS and made the SMP transition in the open, Unix might have gone into the 90s being an unstable juggernaut. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA

freeremote 3y ago

I was a Solaris admin in those days. No one was impressed with the changes. I still, even after all these years, recall the BSD command differences. For whatever reason, I still sometimes enter a random BSDism command on the Linux command line and then say, "Ooops, wrong command. I cannot believe I did that." Especially since I've run Debian stable for the better part of 20 years on and off with attempts to like other distros like Fedora or Arch. Still working in IT closing in on 60 years of age. Still love being a sysadmin. Still love writing shell scripts and automating things.

korginator 3y ago

I used to work with the Sun 3's, SparcStations and other Sun hardware at the time when they were transitioning from the BSD flavoured SunOS to Solaris. There was confusion at many levels including branding. The SysV flavour was initially called SunOS 5, not Solaris. Later they decided to use the Solaris name for later SunOS releases and drop the SunOS name altogether. There was some confusion about the Solaris 1.x vs 2.x naming, since Solaris 1.x was really the BSD flavoured SunOS, while Solaris 2.x was a completely different beast, being all SVR4. What first struck me when we moved from SunOS to Solaris was just how clean and simple SunOS was to manage, from the directory structure to the /etc configurations to device file names. Yes, there were different ways in Solaris to address the disk block device (physical, logical, etc.) but it always made me cringe that something I'd addressed as '/dev/sd0a' now became something like '/devices/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000/sd@0,0:a', or at best '/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0'. The /etc/ filesystem hierarchy also got a lot more complicated. I felt the SVR4 Solaris was far less elegant than SunOS. Guess it was also because of the relative maturity of SunOS, but I felt things just worked as expected and the OS itself was generally snappier than SVR4/Solaris on the same Sparc hardware. Eventually we had no choice but to move to SVR4/Solaris but I still have fond memories of a simpler time and a cleaner SunOS.

hulitu 3y ago
They still called Solaris SunOS. AFAIR Solaris 8 was named (in uname's output) SunOS 5.8.