Chapter 1. Introduction
The Unix operating system originated at AT&T Bell Labs
in the early 1970s.
System V Release 4 came from USL (Unix
System Laboratories) in the late 1980s.
Unix source code is currently owned by SCO (the
Santa Cruz Operation).
Because Unix was able to run on different hardware from
different vendors, developers were encouraged to modify Unix and
distribute it as their own value-added version. Separate Unix
traditions evolved as a result: USL's System V, Berkeley Software
Distribution (BSD, from the University of California, Berkeley), Xenix,
etc.
Today, Unix developers have blended the different traditions into a more standard version. (The ongoing work on
POSIX, an international standard based on System V and BSD,
is influencing this movement.)
This quick reference describes two systems that offer what many people
consider to be a “more standard” version of Unix:
System V Release 4
(SVR4) and Solaris 7.[2]
SVR4, which was developed jointly by USL (then a division of AT&T) and Sun
Microsystems, merged features from BSD and SVR3.
This added about two dozen BSD commands (plus some new SVR4 commands)
to the basic Unix command set.
In addition, SVR4 provides a BSD Compatibility
Package, a kind of “second string” command group. This package
includes some of the most fundamental BSD commands, and its purpose is
to help users of BSD-derived systems make the transition to SVR4.
Solaris 7 is a distributed computing environment
from Sun Microsystems. The history of Solaris 7
is more complicated.
Solaris 7 includes the
SunOS 5.7 operating system, plus additional features such as
the Common Desktop Environment and Java tools.
SunOS 5.7, in turn, merges SunOS 4.1 and SVR4.
In addition,
the kernel has received significant enhancement
to support multiprocessor CPUs,
multithreaded processes,
kernel-level threads,
and
dynamic loading of device drivers and other kernel modules.
Most of the user-level (and system administration)
content comes from SVR4. As a result, Solaris 7 is based on SVR4 but
contains additional BSD/SunOS features. To help in the transition from the old
(largely BSD-based) SunOS, Solaris provides the BSD/SunOS
Compatibility Package and the Binary Compatibility Package.
Sun has made binary versions of Solaris for the SPARC and Intel
architectures available for “free,” for noncommercial use.
You pay only for the media, shipping, and handling.
To find out more, see
http://www.sun.com/developer.
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