The really funny thing for me, is that I remember Monday the 19th of October very differently. Sun had called together the biggest press conference they had ever had, they were announcing that Sun and AT&T were going to work together to jointly build one true standard UNIX which everyone would run, with interoperability and reliably across the spectrum of computing. And that AT&T was putting 1B$ into Sun and had options to put another B$ in.
Eric Schmidt, who was the lead on that press conference, and Bill Joy who was his technical backup, were really confused why all during the conference reporters kept running out of the conference room to make phone calls. They didn't believe that their announcement was that big but everyone was clearly quite agitated.
The clipping service didn't find a single major daily that covered that press release that day. Magazines that had it and were embargoed went with it. But it got little to no coverage.
> Sun and AT&T were going to work together to jointly build one true standard UNIX
Which worked, but technically everything was SysV-flavored afterwards, which in many regards was a huge backward step IMNSHO. Sun OS was a joy to work with before that, not so much after.
Also it was sad to see NeWS go -- and speaking of pain: motif.
> Which worked, but technically everything was SysV-flavored afterwards, which in many regards was a huge backward step IMNSHO.
I'm familiar with the history of System V and BSD as the two competing "flavors" of UNIX, but I've never seen a clear description of what "SysV-flavored" really meant in terms of regular interaction with the system. Since you've clearly had some personal history with this change, could you elaborate on what "SysV-flavored" actually meant for SunOS?
Well, AT&T/SysV regarded themselves as the 600 pound gorilla in the room, and Sun as the young upstart punk kid, so in building a joint system, everything "compromised" by just doing it the SysV way.
/bin & /usr/bin was populated by SysV tools with SysV options, with the particularly incompatible command line options of "ps" that plague it and clones of it to this day.
There were still Sun/BSD bin tools hidden away somewhere for use by the desperate, but they were deprecated and weren't in the search path of one's coworkers etc. etc.
I remember there being a lot of pressure to adopt SysV "streams", which from 20,000 feet sounded very powerful but were actually a nightmare -- not according to me, since I managed to avoid them, but according to later accounts of people I knew at AT&T.
And of course there were similar changes to libraries and man pages and /etc and init and etc.
I cut my teeth on BSD, contributing in small ways to its earliest development, and I considered it an improvement over vanilla Bell Labs/AT&T Unix -- not just NIH; BSD introduced the fast file system and demand paging and the "more" command (later incarnation "less").
AT&T on the other hand responded with a very strong case of Not Invented Here; they really seriously did not want to retrofit improvements like that. And tried to do various clones, like "pg" to replace "more", which was so awful it couldn't even page backwards, just to give some idea.
System III had a few new features but mostly sucked, due to that attitude, and System V was more or less more of the same.
Sun OS took all of the BSD improvements (ok, 7 options to "cat" is arguable, but whatever) and added more nice stuff, like NFS and RPC (RPC got a lot of flak, but originally there really was no alternative) and "Yellow Pages" (later renamed to NIS/Network Information Services for trademark reasons).
NeWS was a breakthrough in windowing, based on postscript rendering to screens (although not the same as Display Postscript), and was quite brilliant.
In creating a common standard, the compromise was to throw away or hide the majority of the BSD and Sun OS improvements in order to, basically, just let AT&T do things their own inferior way.
NFS was already becoming an industry standard, so it didn't go away, but NeWS did, in favor of the incredibly bad "Common Desktop Environment" GUI standard, which was a step backwards relative to all X11 offerings, not just relative to the breakthrough NeWS.
The alternative, Motif, had a ridiculously complex and clumsy API that took vast amounts of boilerplate programming to get anything done. Dark times for GUIs.
[In my first draft I mixed that up with Open Look, a sign of fuzzy memory]
I haven't thought about it in ages, so there are likely a bunch of other things I'm not remembering, but the net result was a standard that was far less pleasant to program to or to do system administration on -- plus many instances of dual standards.
Chuck above was hit by similar nastiness in the kernel itself; I wasn't dealing much with kernel internals at the time, but from what I heard, it was perhaps even worse there.
If Sun OS had merged with Plan 9, that would have actually advanced the world, rather than retarding it.
> NeWS was a breakthrough in windowing, based on postscript rendering to screens (although not the same as Display Postscript), and was quite brilliant.
Although the idea of building apps in PostScript is the stuff nightmares are made of, I recognize it was indeed brilliant. It was partly the work of a young James Gosling.
I remember CDE was heavily, although indirectly, influenced by Microsoft through both HP and IBM. CDE windows and menus are just 3D-like versions of Windows 2 windows.
I'm totally with you there, I count that agreement as the day Sun died. The rest was, as they say, history. One of the things it taught me was how financial analysis can lead you astray technically.
Eric Schmidt, who was the lead on that press conference, and Bill Joy who was his technical backup, were really confused why all during the conference reporters kept running out of the conference room to make phone calls. They didn't believe that their announcement was that big but everyone was clearly quite agitated.
The clipping service didn't find a single major daily that covered that press release that day. Magazines that had it and were embargoed went with it. But it got little to no coverage.