On Sun, 5 Dec 1999, Greg A. Woods wrote:

# > That settling took a full two+ years to happen; it's a good thing Sun
# > didn't wait.
# 
# Well, yes, but then again those of us who continued using SunOS-4 on Sun
# hardware were wondering why Sun was trying to switch OS code-bases in
# the first place....  I.e. at the time we were wondering why they didn't
# just completely trash their half-baked "new universe" and stick with the
# tried and true stuff we were all using anyway!  ;-)

"Phil, I was _there_, man!"  Yes, I know about this -- I was one of them.
And I sat there watching Sun release a version of Missed 'em Five (sorry,
internally it's MUCH uglier than BSD ever was.  Software glue is NOT a
pretty thing to read first thing in the morning), and I thought, "What
in HELL are they doing?"

When SunOS 5 came out, I marveled.  It made a SPARCstation 10 run like
a 1+.  Never saw THAT before!

When I had to resign to Solaris (before NetBSD was available), I came
to the conclusion that the first five releases just sucked.

When they hit 2.5, they nailed it pretty well.  Okay, so it's not the
System-V mentality/concept, but at least it ran more efficiently :-).

You mentioned that ttymon and inittab were orthogonal, i.e. the two
do not necessarily go hand in hand.  Well, that's refreshing.  But
I don't want to see the contents of ttytab go into inittab (too big,
too much) if we do something that stu^H^H^H...um, different.

# > Personally, I think Sun ought not have been bedded by AT&T in the first
# > place.  Solaris 2.0 was a fscking disaster.
# 
# Yeah, but I think that was more because of the way Sun management had
# been falling asleep at the switch....

Yerp.  You can blame the Executive VP of engineering for that one.

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: Unix With Balls.