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SunOS PLUS Solaris still leading (Score:1)
by Guy Harris (guy@netapp.com) on Wednesday November 11, @12:21AM 
(User Info)  
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SunOS is the name Sun gave to their OS when they decided that calling
it "Sun UNIX 4.2BSD Release X.Y" could get AT&T to complain that they
didn't have rights to the UNIX trademark (this was back when, as I
remember, AT&T said it wasn't UNIX if you change anything other than
what you needed to port it to one of the CPUs for which they had
official ports - and, yes, I remember that issue coming up when I was
at Sun for 4.0, the first one that called itself "SunOS" when it
booted).


Solaris is the name Sun gave to the SunOS plus OpenWindows
combination, at about the time their first SVR4-based release came
out; they gave the name both to the one with SunOS 4.1[.y] and the one
with SunOS 5.x, but, as

1) 5.x, being SVR4-based, was quite different from 4.x

and

2) Sun never came out with a standalone SunOS 5.x release, but they
   had SunOS 4.x before they had Solaris

people often think of "SunOS" as referring to pre-5.x SunOS and
"Solaris" as referring to 5.x.

(The notion of "SunOS 5.x" existed before there was any notion of
"Solaris"; I was there when the SVR4 work started, and there wasn't
any notion of "Solaris"....)
 
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SunOS PLUS Solaris still leading (Score:1)
by Brian Knotts (bknotts@netscape.net) on Wednesday November 11, @12:33AM 
(User Info)  
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Well, technically Solaris *is* SunOS; as 'uname -sr' will tell you,
Solaris 2.5.1, for instance, is SunOS 5.5.1. But, technicalities
aside...  SunOS 4.x.x is an older, sort-of-BSD-like (?) UNIX (Not sure
about that one, as I haven't worked much with BSD). Solaris is SysV.

More practically speaking, although a fine OS in its time, SunOS is
getting kinda old and crufty, and has limits that are increasingly
difficult to deal with. Solaris is a more modern UNIX.

The two systems look and act noticeably different, which I understand
did cause some pain during the transition, but you gotta give Sun
credit for biting the bullet and doing the right thing, unlike some
other companies we know...