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I made up the following bit of filk during a Computability class. Hope you like it.

The Day SunOS Died 


Lyrics by N. R. "Norm" Lunde. 
Apologies to Don McLean. 

Remember when those guys out West 
With their longish hair and paisley vests 
Were starting up, straight out of UCB? 
They used those Motorola chips 
Which at the time were really hip 
And looked upon the world through VME. 
Their first attempt ran like a pig 
But it was the start of something big; 
They called the next one the Sun-2 
And though they only sold a few 
It soon gave birth unto the new 
Sun-3 which was their pride 
And now they're singing 

	"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3! 
	 ATT System V has replaced BSD. 
	 You can cling to the standards of the industry 
	 But only if you pay the right fee-- 
	 Only if you pay the right fee . . ." 

The hardware wasn't all they sold. 
Their Berkeley port was solid gold 
And interfaced with System V, no less! 
They implemented all the stuff 
That Berkeley thought would be enough 
Then added RPC and NFS. 
It was a lot of code to cram 
Into just four megs of RAM. 
The later revs were really cool 
With added values like SunTools 
But then they took us all for fools 
By peddling Solaris . . . 
And they were singing, 
	<chorus> 

They took a RISC and kindled SPARC. 
The difference was like light and dark. 
The Sun-4s were the fastest and the best. 
The user base was having fun 
Installing SunOS 4.1 
But what was coming no one could have guessed. 
The installed base was sound 
And software did abound. 
While all the hackers laughed and played 
Already plans were being made 
To make the dubious "upgrade"  
To Sun's new Solaris . . . 
And Sun was singing, 
	<chorus> 

The cartridge tapes were first to go-- 
The CD-ROM's a must, you know 
And floppy drives will soon go out the door. 
I tried to call and ask them why 
But they took away my TTY 
And left my modem lying on the floor. 
While they were on a roll 
They moved the damned Control. 
The Ethernet's now twisted pair 
Which no one uses anywhere. 
ISDN is still more rare-- 
The bandwidth's even less! 
But still they're singing 
	<chorus> 

But worst of all is what they've done 
To software that we used to run 
Like dbx and even /bin/cc. 
Compilers now have license locks 
Wrapped up in OpenWindows crocks-- 
We even have to pay for GCC! 
The applications broke; 
/usr/local went up in smoke. 
The features we've depended on 
Before too long will all be gone 
But Sun, I'm sure, will carry on  
By peddling Solaris, 
Forever singing, 
	<chorus> 

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