I can't find the link anymore, but there is the hacker song 'Bye Bye SunOS 4.3'. Its quite funny. If somebody has the link.

It really is an incredibly important part of Unix history, not just Sun. It basically really started the outright Unix wars. Had Sun just gone with BSD and tried to create that as a standard, they could have taken most of the world with them without creating a massive blowback counter-reaction that their alliance with AT&T provoked.

And AT&T would have been dead in the water, they might have tried with somebody else, but that would have just cast Sun as the good guys and AT&T and whoever as the bad guys and with Sun already being the market leader, that standard would have been pretty dominant I would think.

my boss at the time refused to move to solaris from sunos (on his personal sparc, we moved to solaris at the company), it was my responsibility to deal with the solaris hosts from that point forward. we were definitely a sparc shop (though at the time we only had sun clones, no real sun sparc boxes).

I think it was mostly that he liked the bsd tooling over the at&t tooling, but it instilled so much in me that I still have a hard time remembering the gnu command line options: I tend to default to svr4, then to bsd, and finally to gnu. probably one of the reasons I still feel at home on macOS.