Tag Archives: Solaris

History of Solaris

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Since I will be handling mostly Solaris servers on my next job, I try to start learning about Solaris as I really have no knowledge on it, so I try to start on the history and tried to research on web that would explain it to me briefly and I found this; http://unixed.com/Resources/history_of_solaris.pdf

There are a lot of information on the web but the link above was my favorite and I find it very well written.

Here are some of the interesting part, at least for me :)

The first version of UNIX was written in assembly language on a PDP-11/20. It included the file system, fork, roff, and ed. It was used as a text-processing tool for the preparation of patents.

In the early 1980s, Joy left Berkeley with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, and became cofounder of Sun Microsystems (Sun stands for Stanford University Network). Sun’s implementation of BSD was called SunOS.

SunOS was first released in 1983. — we have the same age :D

1993 Sun announced that SunOS, release 4.1.4, would be its last release of an operating system based on BSD. Sun saw the writing on the wall and moved to System V, release 4, which they named Solaris.

As more hardware vendors, such as Sun, began to enter the picture, a proliferation of UNIX versions emerged. Although these hardware vendors had to purchase the source code from AT&T and port UNIX to their hardware platforms, AT&T’s policy toward licensing the UNIX brand name allowed nearly any hardware vendor willing to pay for a license to pick up UNIX. Because UNIX was a trademark, hardware vendors had to give their operating systems a unique name. Here are a few of the more popular versions of UNIX that have survived over the years:

  • SCO UNIX. SCO Open Desktop and SCO Open Server from the Santa Cruz Operation for the Intel platform. Based on System V.
  • SunOS. Sun’s early operating system and the best-known BSD operating system.
  • Solaris. Sun’s SRV4 implementation, also referred to as SunOS 5.x.
  • HP-UX. Hewlett-Packard’s version of UNIX. HP-UX 9.x was System V, release 3, and HP-UX11i is based on the System V, release 4 OS.
  • Digital UNIX. Digital Equipment’s version of OSF/1.
  • IRIX. The Silicon Graphics version of UNIX. Early versions were BSD-based; version 6 was System V, release 4.
  • AIX. IBM’s System V-based UNIX.
  • Linux. A free UNIX operating system for the INTEL platform; it was quickly gaining a hold in the UNIX community. Versions of Linux became available on Sun, HP, and IBM systems.