Comment by AStonesThrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AStonesThrow | Hacker News Reader

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Just to add some nuance: SunOS up to version 4 was strictly BSD-based with vendor enhancement. "SunOS 5" became Solaris 2, and conversely, SunOS 4 was retroactively dubbed "Solaris 1".

Solaris 2 and up were derived from System V release 4, which had actually merged the best of System V with both Xenix and BSD, so rather than being purely AT&T Unix, SVR4 was promised as the best of all worlds, with some ability to pick and choose which variety was in play, based somewhat on provision of both types of utilities in separate directories, and appropriate libraries and APIs.

SVR4, IMHO, was the best and most stable Unix, and the right choice for vendors to adopt in those days.

funnily enough, solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on what tool you used to query.

sun's pivot from bsd to at&t was a very nice and clean change (I was the one who ended up upgrading our sunos servers to solaris when the time came in the 90's), sequent's switch was a nightmare.

I still miss my e4500, though, but not the noise or electric bill.

adding: /usr/ucb - a very nice bone to throw.

solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on what tool you used to query.

Still true:

  $ uname -sr
  SunOS 5.11

Not entirely unlike Windows 11, a.k.a.

  Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22631.4169]

Not the first time for Windows, Windows 7 is v6.1 internally, then Windows 8 and 8.1 get 6.2 and 6.3[1]. Main explanation is basically "programmers suck at checking version numbers" so Microsoft tried to avoid bumping the major version. I guess they risked pushing the version number to 10 for the "last" version of Windows, but have fallen back to just not touching it now that a new generation of management have decided that it isn't the last version of Windows.

[1] Windows 95 also tells 16 bit apps that it's v3.95, but 32 bit apps get the correct 4.0.

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