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I would say SunOS (i.e. pre Solaris SysV and not including it) was the quality bearer for UNIX in that era. Particularly once they did the Unified Buffer Cache

by kev009 11mo ago

I would say SunOS (i.e. pre Solaris SysV and not including it) was the quality bearer for UNIX in that era. Particularly once they did the Unified Buffer Cache; HP-UX was never able to accomplish this and it makes it not an ideal file server amongst other problems. HP-UX 10 and 11 progressively imported more SysV code and lost some of the charm that 9.x has. I find AIX to be fascinating. Especially 3.x against contemporaries with its LVM, and a pageable kernel. A lot of people have snap judgements against it because they saw 'smit' but don't really understand anything about it.

jonathaneunice 11mo ago
SunOS evolved to be a great file server and "network computing" server, whereas HP-UX evolved to be a better multi-workload commercial server. Horses for courses—and they often ran on different turf. You're also right to shout out out some of the other innovators: Data General's DG/UX did a great "let's redesign the kernel for multiprocessing and NUMA." IBM's AIX had kernel threads, pageability, and preemptibility at a time when no one else did (plus JFS, LVM, and eventually LPAR isolation). And Sequent DYNIX/ptx had some impressive multiprocessing (RCU) and large DBMS optimizations very early on. HP was by no means alone trying to engineer away Unix' early weaknesses.