Some inaccuracies in the timeline. Solaris 2 (the sysv one; the BSD SunOS 4 was after-the-fact renamed to Solaris 1) didn't ship until 1993, not the 80s. Also he says that gcc's support for 68k was important but Solaris never ran on that platform -- Sun made the switch from 68k->SPARC a few years before the BSD->sysv change.
The wider point is correct, but it isn't limited to just Sun. The decision for many UNIX vendors to charge extra for the C compiler was a big reason that gcc caught needed momentum. If that hadn't happened the whole free *nix history might have been very different.
Yes, that timeline error stuck out to me as well. Recently I found Solaris 2.1 physical media, and the date on it is 12/92. My goal is to get old GCC running on it, but first I have to get it running at all. My sun4m is a SparcStation 20, so will probably have to find a sun4c or SS10.
Note to anyone trying to image old Sun CD-ROMs: anything below Solaris 2.4 (?) is a CD-ROM with a partition table. If you dd out /dev/cdrom on Linux, you may get only the first partition, in ISO9660 format. You will be missing the small UFS boot partitions. There should be one small UFS partition for each supported arch.
The wider point is correct, but it isn't limited to just Sun. The decision for many UNIX vendors to charge extra for the C compiler was a big reason that gcc caught needed momentum. If that hadn't happened the whole free *nix history might have been very different.