[korginator]

I used to work with the Sun 3's, SparcStations and other Sun hardware at the time when they were transitioning from the BSD flavoured SunOS to Solaris. There was confusion at many levels including branding. The SysV flavour was initially called SunOS 5, not Solaris. Later they decided to use the Solaris name for later SunOS releases and drop the SunOS name altogether. There was some confusion about the Solaris 1.x vs 2.x naming, since Solaris 1.x was really the BSD flavoured SunOS, while Solaris 2.x was a completely different beast, being all SVR4.

What first struck me when we moved from SunOS to Solaris was just how clean and simple SunOS was to manage, from the directory structure to the /etc configurations to device file names. Yes, there were different ways in Solaris to address the disk block device (physical, logical, etc.) but it always made me cringe that something I'd addressed as '/dev/sd0a' now became something like '/devices/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000/sd@0,0:a', or at best '/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0'. The /etc/ filesystem hierarchy also got a lot more complicated. I felt the SVR4 Solaris was far less elegant than SunOS.

Guess it was also because of the relative maturity of SunOS, but I felt things just worked as expected and the OS itself was generally snappier than SVR4/Solaris on the same Sparc hardware. Eventually we had no choice but to move to SVR4/Solaris but I still have fond memories of a simpler time and a cleaner SunOS.

[hulitu]

They still called Solaris SunOS. AFAIR Solaris 8 was named (in uname's output) SunOS 5.8.