[TUHS] SVR4 vs. Solaris 2

[Kevin Bowling via TUHS]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 12:25 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, November 18th, 2025 at 10:17, Daria Phoebe Brashear via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Nov 15, 2025 at 8:14 PM Rob Gingell via TUHS tuhs at tuhs.org wrote:
> >
> > > Phase 2: produce SVR4. Incorporate 4.2 BSD and the major Sun
> > > technologies (memory management, dynamic linking, NFS) through SunOS
> > > 4.0. Sun expected to ship SunOS 5.0 based on SVR4.
> > >
> > > Phase 3: future stuff. Overtaken by events and abandoned. The Spring
> > > Research OS in SunLabs came out it.
> > >
> > > The marketing transition to Solaris occurred after all this was in
> > > motion out of rationales that weren't related to the joint work.
> >
> >
> > Does a copy of Spring exist somewhere? For reasons I no longer
> > remember we failed to get a copy after talking about it when I worked
> > for Carnegie Mellon (it certainly wasn't an issue of money or
> > licensing; we had Solaris 2.4 source, for instance: i was the keeper
> > of the CDs)
> >
> > I vaguely remember Bryan saying he had a copy like 5 years ago but I
> > don't recall anything coming of it.
> >
> > --
> > Daria Phoebe Brashear
> > AuriStor, Inc
> > dariaphoebe.com
>
> Well the gist I'm getting from all of this discussion is that
> indeed USL and Sun collaborated on what would become SVR4, but
> they did not precisely land on one unified product between the
> two organizations, rather, Sun contributed to the development of
> SVR4, took that combined product, then further lumped their own
> stuff on top before then marketing it as Solaris.
>
> In other words, Solaris is SVR4, but SVR4 is not necessarily
> Solaris, and Sun did additional work on their value-add rather
> than also jointly considering virgin SVR4 their product. That's
> what I take away from this discussion anyway.

I'm not sure if we have any USL/Univel/Novell or SCO people but it
would be interesting to get their takes on this as well.  Early
UnixWare would've been close to vanilla SVR4.0, but it seems like
there were still redistributable source projects like SVR4.1 and
SVR4.2 that went out to vendors that shipped fairly vanilla SVR4 like
Dell, Intel, Microport, UHC, ESIX, NCR and whomever wanted to lift
parts into their existing OSes.

> - Matt G.