Inside Solaris™ 9

1993

Sun announced that SunOS, release 4.1.4, would be its last release of an operating system based on BSD. Sun saw the writing on the wall and moved to System V, release 4, which it named Solaris. System V, release 4 (SRV4), was a merger of System V and BSD, incorporating the important features found in SunOS.

As more hardware vendors, such as Sun, began to enter the picture, a proliferation of UNIX versions emerged. Although these hardware vendors had to purchase the source code from AT&T and port UNIX to their hardware platforms, AT&T’s policy toward licensing the UNIX brand name allowed nearly any hardware vendor willing to pay for a license to pick up UNIX. Because UNIX was a trademark, hardware vendors had to give their operating systems ...