Back in 1987, AT&T and Sun said that they were planning to build a new variant of UNIX, merging the two most commonly used versions at the time - BSD and System V. This new UNIX variant would be named UNIX System V Release 4 - SVR4.

In 1991, Sun announced that they were replacing their existing UNIX OS, SunOS, with a new variant based on SVR4. SunOS was based on BSD and Sun were starting to run into issues with that variant, and so with an eye to the future Sun announced Solaris 2.

SunOS was then renamed Solaris 1, and each Solaris version was made up of the operating environment (Solaris 2.6, Solaris 7, Solaris 10) and it’s related kernel (SunOS 5.6, SunOS 5.7, SunOS 10). The reason for this strange branding was that Solaris would mean the entire operating environment, which included the window manager and other applications.

Solaris now uses a single codebase for both SPARC and x86 products. Previous products had officially been ported by Sun to the PowerPC and Itanium processors. Solaris is now one of the most popular UNIX versions, thanks to it’s power, scalability, and many new technologies Sun include with each release.

With the release of OpenSolaris, Sun have completed the process of open sourcing a powerful enterprise UNIX, enabling even the smallest Solaris consultancy to design a scaleable UNIX infrastructure.

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