Solaris, early called SunOS, is the distributed computing environment of Sunsoft (a division of Sun Microsystems). Solaris 1.x is the same as SunOS 4.1.x, which is Sun's BSD-based Unix operation system. Solaris 1.0 was released in February 1991.
Solaris 2.0 came out in Jul. 92. Solaris 2.x is System V (Release 4) based Unix System, which includes the SunOS 5.0 and OpenWindows. SunOS 5.0 merges SunOS 4.1 and SVR4. Most of the new content comes from SVR4, but it contains additional BDS/SunOS feature. Thus Solaris 2.0 provided the BSD/SunOS compatibility package and the Binary Compatibility Package to help in the transition from the old (largely BSD-based) SunOS. There are many improvements implemented from Solaris Version 2.0 to Version 2.6, in category like: multiprocessor scalability, Virtual Memory enhancements, user interface improvement and database performance improvement (especially for ORACLE).
Solaris 7 was released at October 27, 1998. The name was changed from 2.7 to Solaris 7 shortly before release for marketing reasons. The most significant is that Solaris 7 is a full 64-bit operating system, but still functions in 32-bit mode on older hardware. Another new and notable feature of Solaris 7 is that it includes the new version (v. 8.1.2) of the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND), the implementation of the Domain Name System (DNS) used on most systems.
In January 2000, Sun introduced Solaris 8, the vendor's second-generation, 64-bit, Unix operating system. Marketed as the dot-com operating system, Solaris 8 builds on Solaris 7 with extended data center and Internet capabilities. It surged ahead to capture the overall lead for Unix operation-system functions, and turned to be the main platforms for Web servers, e-commerce and messaging. A key contributor to the Solaris dominance was that it offers several unique key features, including: Dynamic Reconfiguration and Dynamic Domains.
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