[geeks] Sun vs. SysVr4.

[Greg A. Woods]

[[ best to reply-to geeks ... ]]

[ On Tuesday, August 21, 2001 at 23:12:35 (-0700), James Lockwood wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] FDDI questions.
>
> Several elements of SVR4 which were derived from SunOS 4 were the unified
> VM system (one of the SunOS crown jewels) and terminal handling.

Although the initial VM in SysVr4.0 (and 4.1?) was Sun's, I'm not so
sure the 4.2 one was.  I have a paper buried in a conference proceedings
buried in a box, probably in the garage, describing the SysVr4.2 VM (a
really hi-quality gem!) and I have vague memories that the names on it
are not folks from Sun, but I may be mistaken.

As for the terminal handling, do you mean the "termios", or the
user-land side with "ttymon" et al?  IIRC the ttymon/sac,saf stuff was
all from AT&T.  They had the beginnings of it in SysVr3.2 and before.

> Remember that Sun was a party to the AT&T Unix grand unification effort at
> the time (which was only partially successful due to the efforts of IBM,
> HP and DEC forming the OSF).

Oh, of course -- OSF -- how could I possibly have forgotten.  I guess
some memories should be kept buried....  ;-)

(OSF is what I was vaguely thinking of when I was describing the revolt
by all the other vendors to the Sun+AT&T partnership.)

Isn't it odd how DEC was the only one to really ship a full OSF-based OS!  :-/

(Interestingly Compaq just the other day announced increased support for
Unix on AlphaServer again!  ;-)

(that's not to say OSF didn't come up with some very good stuff too though)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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