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A Unix [1] variety
Solaris [2] is actually a combination of products from Sun [3]. It
has a long-ish history, some of which is recounted here
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 [4].
Around the time of SunOS [5] 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 [6] to become compatible with System V.
By this time, SunOS [7] 4 (the BSD-based version) was being sold as
Solaris 1 -- a combination of the SunOS [8] 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 [9] 5 by Sun.
Solaris has since evolved through versions 2.0 up to 2.6 (being SunOS
[10] 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 [11] 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.
Links:
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[1] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?Unix
[2] http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/index.html
[3] http://www.sun.com
[4] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?SunOS
[5] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?SunOS
[6] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?SunOS
[7] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?SunOS
[8] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?SunOS
[9] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?SunOS
[10] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?SunOS
[11] http://melbournewireless.org.au/?SunOS
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