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wow why are there so many expensive bsds
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@ezio Because (1) there legally couldn't be a free one before Net/2 and 4.4BSD-Lite were released and (2) BSD was/is actually good. It represented the cutting edge of Unix development for a long time so a lot of vendors got in on it early on and AT&T couldn't compete with it by merit so they had to buy 20% of Sun to kill off SunOS and replace it with the SysVR4-based Solaris.
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@allison wait so solaris wasnt sunos after a while?
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@ezio There are three different Sun Unix operating systems. The first (very early on) was a straight port of V7 Unix by Unisoft (just like a lot of other vendors), then Sun hired a bunch of the early BSD developers from CSRG and made a BSD derivative called SunOS. This continued until AT&T invested in Sun buying out something like 15-20% of their common stock. A condition of the investment was that they had to kill off the BSD-based SunOS and base the next major version (SunOS 5) on SysVR4 and that operating system (SunOS 5.x) was branded Solaris in marketing copy to differentiate it from the BSD-based SunOS that came before.
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@allison @ezio Specifically, they named the new product Solaris 2.x, with the underlying operating system named SunOS 5.x. The BSD-based SunOS versions were retroactively renamed Solaris 1.x, with the underlying OS called SunOS 4.x.

This is indeed very complicated, and most people just kept calling the old system SunOS and the SysV-based one Solaris.

Source: I was working for Sun around the time when Solaris 2 became usable (it took several releases before that happened).

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@loke @ezio Not entirely related to any of the above but did you ever see Spring while you were working there? I've been trying to track down a copy for the better part of a decade now and all my potential leads have come up thin.
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@allison @ezio Sorry, I didn't. Me and a few other colleagues did play around with getting old stuff that we found running, like a version of Solaris 2.0 beta that we found on a CD (it was terrible). I also remember coming across a CD with Sun Nextstep.

But I don't think I ever heard about Spring.

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@loke @ezio Understandable, it seems to have been a pretty isolated project even within Sun. Solaris 2.0 Beta sounds *incredibly* cursed, really I would say all of them were up to... 2.5.1?

@allison @ezio yes, 2.5.1 was the first version that was production grade, especially with the later patches.

I do remember that to get that Solaris 2.0 beta to run we had to dig out some really old hardware in the lab. Thankfully we had shelves full of it.

Mar 26, 2025, 01:02 PM·Quiet public·Tusky Test
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