Re: www.microsoft.com sure needs a lot of silicon

Darin Johnson (darin_at_usa.net.delete_me) wrote:
: >:> This was unclear. What I meant to say was that SUN so overplayed their
: >:> hand, claiming that SPArc would be the ONLY blessed AT&T architecture,
: >:> that their competitors formed OSF.
:
: I don't think Sun claimed this; but the competitors were fearful anyway,
: as any closer link between AT&T and Sun was viewed by them as bad news.
: By forming OSF to oppose Sun/ATT they didn't help things any; they should
: have allowed them in from the start rather than start another useless
: UNIX civil war.
:

Actually since I lived through this, IBM and Digital had a small interest in UNIX in the late 80's and OSF/1 was a perfect way to keep UNIX fragmented. It was in their best interest. HP had no choice but to go with OSF/1. I still remember 1989(?) UNIX Expo when IBM had this HUGE Mainframe layout display. It was quite clear IBM and UNIX didn't go hand in hand back then. And Digital has never liked UNIX.

But notice that Sun stayed with SVR4, which is what Solaris 2.5/2.6 is built on today, but the others abandoned their OSF/1 kernels except for Digital. Kind of says something. All we got from this war was Motif 1.x!

The idea for SVR4 was to combine the most popular UNIX's, which unfortunately happened to unclude SunOS, along with SYSV, BSD and Xenix. AT&T contracted Sun to do the work. Originally Bill Joy wanted the entire kernel written in C++, which never panned out. Remember Sun did more for UNIX then any other company. But the idea from the beginning was an OS for everyone, just the others felt Sun would have an unfair advantage in getting their SVR4 OS out to market before others. Not Sun's fault AT&T contracted them.

And also remember, that at one time Sun had it's own people working at UCB doing UNIX work since SunOS was based on 4.2/4.3, so it's not like Sun had never done this type of thing before. I think everyone gained from this, just as we all gained from NFS & NIS from Sun.

Sun only does UNIX unlike it's larger compeititors. Received on Thu May 08 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT