[Talk] Re: [Linux-aus] SCO position, rationale and AUUG

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 24 May 2003 at  8:40:57 +0930, Andrew Rutherford wrote:
> At 6:05 PM +0930 22/5/03, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
>>> Bear in mind that one of the reasons that (I was told) Sun went
>>> System V for Solaris was because of the fact that the SunOS BSD
>>> kernel didn't MP anywhere near as well as System V
>>
>> So they say, at least nowadays.  I find that hard to believe, given
>> that at the time (System V.3(.0)) it didn't have *any* support for
>> SMP.  That didn't come until the early 1990s.
>
> At the time (I still have some old Sun press releases for amusements
> sake, plus some email conversations with Sun employees at the time),
> Sun were trying to get more of a focus and business and less in
> education/engineering, and believed that SysV had a much greater
> following in the business world

Yes, that was my recollection from things we heard at Tandem.  We were
just getting on the System V bandwagon ourselves, and we looked at Sun
with great suspicion.

> (were they thinking about SCO? That would be a great irony!),

No, I don't think so.  My recollection at the time was that
Intel-based UNIX was looked on as something of a toy.  When we *did*
start using UNIX on Intel, it was In(ter)active UNIX, not SCO, which
we looked upon as a strange hybrid with Microsoft.

> and having a system based on code generally thought to be made by
> "tinkerers" rather than "software professionals" would be a
> hindrance in their push into the high-end business market.

Yes, I think this is quite valid.  At the time we also used some of
the "Berkeley extensions" like TCP/IP.  Others include FFS in the list
of extensions, though we didn't implement it.  The impression I got at
the time was that BSD UNIX was pretty crappy, though it contained some
good ideas.  It wasn't until I actually got my hands on it (BSD/386,
in March 1992) that I was surprised to find how much better it worked
than Interactive UNIX/386.

Greg
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