Hey Bryan, you could be right, I never really got over the Solaris thing. It was such a step backwards (at the time, it had none of the Sun goodness that was in SunOS). So maybe I heard it wrong. But at the time it seemed like you had a blind spot for anything Sun. Which resonated with me on the passion part but not so much on the lets make things better part. Sounds like you got past that.
I can only imagine the fury over the stupid decision to replace SunOS with Solaris: it was corporate wrong-headedness at its absolute worst, and the company was lucky to have survived it at all. I did love Sun[1] (the good parts, anyway) -- and I'm eternally grateful that we managed to get the system open sourced before the ship went under the waves. I still use DTrace, ZFS, zones, etc. every day[2], and that is thanks in no small part to your vision -- had it only been heeded in a more timely fashion!
If I'd not been able to run Sun OS 4.3 was it? for a long time, until Solaris was tolerable, a lot of future Sun purchases influenced by myself would not have happened.
What was most galling was that guinea pig advertisement, crowing about a rather broken current version of Solaris in comparison to the still not yet ruined and much less buggy Windows NT of the time. To those of us with a foot in both ecosystems ... it really rubbed us raw when struggling with Solaris.
