Yeah, but when they switched to System V they lost me.
Not in terms of total installations, momentum and exponential expansion of the entire industry distort that, but in terms of it's influence. This is also the exact same time that 386BSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD and Linux started releasing.
As others have pointed out BSD-based SunOS was the king of Unix-like operating systems in the late 80's to early 90's. Sys-V based Solaris (1992) was an immediate flop and quickly earned the nickname "Slowlaris". Only by version 2.4 was it even usable in production. By 2.6 it was a decent operating system but anyone who remembered using SunOS wished they had never switched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann
>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
>Subject: The Worst Job in the World
>From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>
>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
4.2 > V:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...