A Brief History of Solaris

Solaris, the UNIX-based operating system developed by SUN Microsystem, was born in 1987. AT&T and SUN Microsystem tried to combine the leading Unix versions (BSD, XENIX, and System V) into one operating system.
In 1991, SUN Microsystem replaced it's existing Unix operating system (SunOS 4) with one based on SVR4, called Solaris 2.
Contained with many new advances, including use of the Open Network Computing (ONC) functionality, NIS+ and OpenWindows graphical user interface, Solaris 2 was specially designed for symmetric multiprocessing.

And now, for more than twenty-years, numerous versions of Solaris has been released with great innovations to adapt the changing of the computer environment, trying to anticipate where the computer world is going.
Innovations that Solaris OS has made will takes pages to be described. I’ll show you some of the most important milestones:
1. 1996 – Solaris 2.5.1 – NFSv3 file system and NFS/TCP, CDE (Common Desktop Environment), included support for the Macintosh PowerPC and the CDE (Common Desktop Environment), expanded user and group IDs to 32 bits.
2. 1997 – Solaris 2.6 – Kerberos 5 security encryption, WebNFS file system and large file support to increase Solaris internet performance
3. 1998 – Solaris 2.7 (renamed just Solaris 7) – 64-bit released, dramatically increased its performance, capacity, and scalability. Native support for file system meta-data logging (UFS logging)
4. 2000 – Solaris 8 – first OS to combine datecentre and dot-com requirements, offering support for IPMP, IPv6 and IPSEC, Multipath I/O.
5. 2002 – Solaris 9 – OpenWindows (in favour of Linux compatibility), and added a Resource Manager, the Solaris Volume Manager, extended file attributes, and the iPlanet Directory Server
6. 2005 – Solaris 10 – free of charge, more compatible with Linux and IBM system, Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), NFSv4, Java Desktop System based on GNOME, ZFS (later in 2006)
7. 2006 – OpenSolaris Project – In the first year, the community had grown to 29 user groups globally with over than 14,000 members, working on 31 active projects.
The “evolution” of the Solaris OS shows the capacity of Sun Microsystem to be on the cutting edge of the computing world without losing touch with the current computing environment. New versions of Solaris is regularly released incorporated the latest development in computer technology and also included more cross-platform compatibility and incorporating the advances of other systems.