SunOS was the version of the UNIX operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstations and server systems until the early 1990s. This was based on BSD UNIX with some additions from UNIX System V in later versions. Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to UNIX Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... In computing, an operating system (aka, OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive, the last decade of the 20th Century. ... BSD redirects here; for other uses see BSD (disambiguation). ... AT&T UNIX System V was one of the versions of the UNIX operating system. ...

SunOS 1.0 was based largely on 4.1BSD and released in 1982. SunOS 2.0, released in 1985, used 4.2BSD as a basis and introduced a virtual filesystem (VFS) layer and the NFS protocol. SunOS 3.0 coincided with the launch of the Sun-3 series in 1986 and incorporated various utilities from System V. SunOS 4.0, released in 1989, migrated to a 4.3BSD base, introduced a new virtual memory system, dynamic linking and an implementation of the System V STREAMS I/O architecture. BSD redirects here; for other uses see BSD (disambiguation). ... Network File System (NFS) is a protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 and defined in RFCs 1094, 1813, and 3530 (obsoletes 3010), as a distributed file system which allows a computer to access files over a network as easily as if they were on its local disks. ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley starting in the 1970s. ... The memory pages of the virtual address space seen by the process, may reside non-contiguously in primary, or even secondary storage. ... A linker or link editor is a program that takes one or more objects generated by compilers and assembles them into a single executable program. ...

SunOS 1 and 2 supported the Sun-2 series. SunOS 3 supported Sun-2 and Sun-3 series systems; there was also a preliminary Sun-4 release of SunOS 3.2. SunOS 4 supported Sun-2 (until release 4.0.3), Sun-3 (until 4.1.1), Sun-386 (4.0.1 and 4.0.2 only) and Sun-4 architectures.

In the early 1990s Sun replaced the BSD-derived SunOS 4 with a version of UNIX System V Release 4, which they named Solaris 2. SunOS 4 was then retroactively named "Solaris 1" in Sun marketing material. System V, previously known as AT&T System V, was one of the versions of the Unix computer operating system. ... This article contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. ... A retronym is a new word or phrase coined for an old object or concept whose original name has become used for something else or is no longer unique. ...

The last release of SunOS 4 was 4.1.4 (Solaris 1.1.2) in 1994. It supported SMP on some machines, but it had only a single lock on the kernel, so only one CPU at a time could execute in the kernel. The sun4, sun4c and sun4m architectures are supported in 4.1.4, sun4d and sun4u are unsupported. SunOS used the OpenLook windowing system, in later Solaris releases they also introduced CDE. Symmetric Multiprocessing, or SMP, is a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory. ... CPU can stand for: in computing: Central processing unit in journalism: Commonwealth Press Union in law enforcement: Crime prevention unit in software: Critical patch update, a type of software patch distributed by Oracle Corporation in Macleans College is often known as Ash Lim. ... OPEN LOOK or OpenLook was an early graphical user interface (GUI) specification developed by Sun Microsystems and AT&T in the early 1990s for UNIX workstations. ... Possible meanings: Cable Discharge Event Caledonia (airport) California Department of Education Call Detail Element Card Data Entry Career Development Event Center for Demography and Ecology Center for Directed Energy Center for Document Engineering Centre for Development and Environment Certificate in Data Education Certified Data Educator Certified Diabetes Educator Chemical Defense...

Confusingly, the core of the Solaris operating environment (Solaris 2 onwards) is identified as SunOS 5 despite its very different origins compared to previous SunOS releases.

The SunOS 5 minor version included in Solaris releases corresponds to the minor (up to Solaris 2.6) or major (Solaris 7 onwards) Solaris version number. For example, Solaris 2.4 incorporated SunOS 5.4 and the latest Solaris release, Solaris 10, runs on SunOS 5.10. Solaris man pages are labeled with SunOS, and the startup sequence displays it, but the term "SunOS" is no longer used in Sun marketing documents. Almost all substantial UNIX and Unix-like operating systems have extensive documentation available as an electronic manual, split into multiple sections called man pages (short for manual pages and based on the command used to display them). ...

External links

• The Sun Hardware Reference (Overview)
• SunOS & Solaris Version History
• An Introduction to Solaris — a sample chapter from Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture by Jim Mauro & Richard McDougall, Prentice-Hall, 2000. (PDF)