[rescue] SunOS 4.x (was: Re: FDDI stuff)

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, August 22, 2001 at 02:39:46 (-0700), James Lockwood wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] SunOS 4.x (was: Re: FDDI stuff)
>
> On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > 
> > Also, anybody know if there ever actually was a 4.1.4 for the UltraSPARC?
> > I kept hearing rumors that Sun did an internal "port" to satisfy a VERY LARGE
> > (tm) customer that didnt want to switch to Solaris, but never offically
> > released it because they didnt want to cripple SunOS 5.x sales.
> 
> This is urban legend spread by SunOS 4 diehards.

I'm not so sure about that.  The Sun Canada OPCOM group did major
amounts of hacking on SunOS (3, 4, & 5) for many BIG customers (and
still do).  Some of their code went back into the main tree, but some of
it didn't.

I know for a fact (well second-hand) that SunOS-4 was built internally
on UltraSPARC, but I don't know if any customer, big or small, was ever
given a copy of the result.  I suspect some big customers with source
code may have built it on UltraSPARC themselves too (though unless you'd
already done a 64-bit OS the port would be a major nightmare, at least
to get it running stably enough to use).

Next time I'm in face-to-face contact with any of the former or current
OPCOM guys I know I'll try to remember to ask them about 4.1.4 on
UltraSPARC and see what they say.....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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