SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems from 1982 until the mid-1990s. The SunOS name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 and later are based on UNIX System V Release 4 and are marketed under the brand name Solaris.

History

SunOS 1 only supported the Sun-2 series systems, including Sun-1 systems upgraded with Sun-2 (68010) CPU boards. SunOS 2 supported Sun-2 and Sun-3 (68020) series systems. SunOS 4 supported Sun-2 (until release 4.0.3), Sun-3 (until 4.1.1), Sun386i (4.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 only) and Sun-4 (SPARC) architectures. Although SunOS 4 was intended to be the first release to fully support Sun's new SPARC processor, there was also a SunOS 3.2 release with preliminary support for Sun-4 systems.

SunOS 4.1.2 introduced support for Sun's first sun4m-architecture multiprocessor machines (the SPARCserver 600MP series); since it had only a single lock for the kernel, only one CPU at a time could execute in the kernel.

The last release of SunOS 4 was 4.1.4 (Solaris 1.1.2) in 1994. The sun4, sun4c and sun4m architectures were supported in 4.1.4; sun4d was not supported.

Sun continued to ship SunOS 4.1.3 and 4.1.4 until December 27, 1998; they were supported until September 30, 2003.

Version history

{| class="wikitable sortable" style="font-size: smaller;"

! SunOS version

! Release date

! Codebase

! Description

|-

|Sun UNIX 0.7

|1982

|UniSoft UNIX v7

|Bundled with 68000-based Sun-1 system. No windowing system.

|-

|SunOS 1.0

|Nov 1983

| rowspan = "4" |4.2BSD

|Support for 68010-based Sun-1 and Sun-2 systems. Introduced Sun Window System.

|-

|SunOS 1.1

|Apr 1984

|

|-

|SunOS 1.2 layered on top of lower-level windowing and bitmap libraries; Sun then developed a novel window system called NeWS that used and extended the PostScript language and graphics model. In 1989, Sun released OpenWindows, an OPEN LOOK-compliant X11-based environment which also supported SunView and NeWS applications. This became the default SunOS GUI in SunOS 4.1.1.

See also

  • Comparison of BSD operating systems
  • Comparison of operating systems
  • Illumos
  • OpenSolaris
  • OpenIndiana
  • Solaris (operating system)
  • JavaOS
  • Unix wars

References

  • The Sun Hardware Reference (Overview)
  • An Introduction to Solaris – a sample chapter from Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture by Jim Mauro & Richard McDougall, Prentice-Hall, 2000. (PDF)
  • Info on SunOS from OSdata (last updated February 17, 2002)
  • Initial Solaris announcement