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Comment by Zecc | Hacker News Reader

See also: Sun Microsystems' logo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sun-Logo.svg

Gosh I've seen that so many times before and yet never really looked at it until now.

When I went to my first computer fair as a teenager, I saw the Sun Microsystems booth and was blown away by the fantastic logo. As I had never seen a Unix machine before, I didn’t know what to do with the computers on display, though.

The very first Unix I was exposed to was from Sun; I remember seeing the logo on their servers and thinking that those were the most beautiful computers I had seen (which isn't much because I had hardly seen any servers before that). I still remember that one of those came with a key (forgot whether to turn it on or lock the power button panel?)

Didn't Sun computers run Irix? Is Irix Unix?

IRIX was SGI, not Sun (and anyways yes, it's a Unix).

Thanks for clarifying. I always thought these other named systems were Unix-like but not Unix but without going all recursive like GNU with the naming

The history of UNIX is complex...

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix)

Suns ran Solaris, of course.

SunOS was BSD-ish originally, then around 1994 they shifted to a more SVR4 variant and rebranded to Solaris. I think Solaris 2.x was SVR4 and Solaris 1.x was BSD retronaming of what was SunOS named earlier.

It's been a while so I may not have the numbers quite right.

Anyway, there was some overlap in nomenclature, so a version bump of the SunOS naming (and Solaris numbering) implied a shift from BSD-ish to SVR4-ish, as I recall.

(And I worked for Sun for a while after that, and used Suns a ton around the shift)

"SunOS is the kernel, Solaris is the distribution as a whole" was how I was always told it went. Solaris 1.x used a SunOS 4.x kernel, Solaris 2.x and upwards used SunOS 5.x. Version synchronicity was achieved by jumping from Solaris 2.6/SunOS 5.6 to Solaris 7.x/SunOS 5.7 in 1998 when UltraSPARC support was introduced. Of course Solaris 11.x/SunOS 5.11 was the last version.

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