{http://wwws.sun.com/software/images/logos/solaris_logo.gif Solaris Logo}



A [Unix] variety



(http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/index.html Solaris) is actually a combination of products from (http://www.sun.com Sun).  It has a long-ish history, some of which is recounted here {/regexpicons/emoticons/emoticon-face3.png ;)}



In the beginning, there was the Stanford University Network (ie, SUN) workstation -- a 68k-based machine, designed to bring the power of minicomputers to the technical desktop.  It was supplied with Berkeley's Unix -- BSD 4.2, I think.



This was gradually extended and basically improved by Bill Joy and the team at Sun, and now called SunOS.



Around the time of SunOS 4.1, Sun allied itself with AT&T, who owned Unix at the time.  BSD had diverged from AT&T's version of Unix, System V, many years ago and the two were quite incompatible from a programmer's viewpoint.  As part of their alliance with AT&T, Sun agreed to change SunOS to become compatible with System V.



By this time, SunOS 4 (the BSD-based version) was being sold as Solaris 1 -- a combination of the SunOS kernel, NIS, NFS and various other bits and pieces.



Solaris 2 was the first version to switch over to the new, System V-based kernel, confusing called SunOS 5 by Sun.



Solaris has since evolved through versions 2.0 up to 2.6 (being SunOS 5.0 - 5.6) and then the marketing forces once again took hold of the OS naming.  Solaris 7 (aka Solaris 2.7 containing SunOS 5.7), Solaris 8 and shortly Solaris 9, have joined the ranking of those products where every release is a major version number.



Solaris is currently available for Sun's SPARC machines and a limited number of Intel IA86 machines, although the Intel port has been dropped for Solaris 9.



It's a mature, stable OS and has a good set of features that help make it an OS of choice for high-performance environments.