SunOS

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Stands for: Sun's BSD-based Unix, versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, 1982 to 1994

Sun Microsystems' original Unix, BSD-based, shipped from 1982 to version 4.1.4 of September 1994; the name is used for releases 1.0 to 4.1.4, after which the System V Release 4 line was sold as Solaris.

SunOS is the Berkeley half of Sun's history. Sun developed it for its workstations and servers from 1982, and the name is usually used only for 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 marketed as Solaris. SunOS 1 ran the Sun-2; SunOS 2 the Sun-2 and Sun-3; SunOS 4 the Sun-2, Sun-3, the Sun386i and the Sun-4 SPARC machines, and 4.1.2 brought Sun's first multiprocessor support with a single kernel lock. Its heritage is Bill Joy's: a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution joined Sun soon after its founding and is counted as a founder. In 1987 AT&T and Sun announced the merger of BSD, System V and Xenix into SVR4, and on 4 September 1991 Sun announced the switch; the last SunOS 4 release was 4.1.4, Solaris 1.1.2, in 1994, shipped until 27 December 1998 and supported until 30 September 2003. Many of the conventions a Unix engineer thinks of as Sun's came from this line.

What it was. SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for its workstation and server computers from 1982 until the mid-1990s. It was a BSD system, which placed Sun on the Berkeley side of the great Unix divide of the 1980s against the System V camp of AT&T and most other vendors, and that choice shaped the network: Sun was an early advocate of Unix-based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially its own Network File System, and its motto, coined by John Gage, was The Network is the Computer.

Hardware and releases. SunOS 1 supported only the Sun-2 series, including Sun-1 systems upgraded with Sun-2 processor boards; SunOS 2 the Sun-2 and the 68020-based Sun-3; SunOS 4 the Sun-2 until 4.0.3, the Sun-3 until 4.1.1, the Sun386i in 4.0 to 4.0.2 and the Sun-4 SPARC architecture, with a SunOS 3.2 release having given preliminary Sun-4 support earlier. SunOS 4.1.2 introduced support for Sun's first sun4m multiprocessor machines, the SPARCserver 600MP series, with a single kernel lock, so only one processor at a time could execute in the kernel. The last release of SunOS 4 was 4.1.4, also named Solaris 1.1.2, in 1994; it supported sun4, sun4c and sun4m, not sun4d. Sun continued to ship 4.1.3 and 4.1.4 until 27 December 1998 and supported them until 30 September 2003.

The renaming. In 1987 AT&T and Sun announced they were collaborating to merge BSD, including many features then unique to SunOS, System V and Xenix into what became System V Release 4. On 4 September 1991 Sun announced that its next major release would switch from the BSD-derived source base to one based on SVR4; the internal designation would be SunOS 5, but Sun began using the marketing name Solaris as an overbrand for the operating system, OpenWindows and ONC. Although the SVR4 system was not expected to ship in volume until the following year, Sun immediately applied the new name to the current release: SunOS 4.1.1 became Solaris 1.0, SunOS 5.0 became part of Solaris 2.0, and each later SunOS 4.1.x micro release received a Solaris 1.x name, which customers mostly ignored.

Why a network glossary keeps it. NFS and much of the way a Unix host thinks about a network were born or matured on this line, and the habit of calling the whole family SunOS survived the renaming by decades: Solaris 11.4 still carries SunOS 5.11 at its core. The Solaris entry carries the second half; the Sun Microsystems record on the industry timeline carries the company.

Also known as: sunos 4, sunos 4.1.4, sun os, bsd sun

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