Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
Oracle Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system offered by Oracle for SPARC and x86-64 based workstations and servers. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems as Solaris, it superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993 and became known for its scalability, especially on SPARC systems, and for originating many innovative features such as DTrace, ZFS and Time Slider. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.
OpenStep is an object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification developed by NeXT. It provides a framework for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and developing software applications. OpenStep was designed to be platform-independent, allowing developers to write code that could run on multiple operating systems, including NeXTSTEP, Windows NT, and various Unix-based systems. It has influenced the development of other GUI frameworks, such as Cocoa for macOS, and GNUstep.
tmpfs is a temporary file storage paradigm implemented in many Unix-like operating systems. It is intended to appear as a mounted file system, but data is stored in volatile memory instead of a persistent storage device.
Unix System V is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. System V Release 4 (SVR4) was commercially the most successful version, being the result of an effort, marketed as Unix System Unification, which solicited the collaboration of the major Unix vendors. It was the source of several common commercial Unix features. System V is sometimes abbreviated to SysV.
OpenSolaris is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the eponymous operating system software.
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in OpenSolaris and its descendant illumos, and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.
OpenWindows is a discontinued desktop environment for Sun Microsystems workstations which combined a display server supporting the X Window System protocol, the XView and OLIT toolkits, the OPEN LOOK Window Manager (olwm), and the DeskSet productivity tools; earlier versions of OpenWindows also supported the NeWS protocol. It implements the OPEN LOOK GUI specification.
Tadpole Computer was a manufacturer of rugged, military specification, UNIX workstations, thin client laptops and lightweight servers.
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but also had many problems. Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna – decided to redo the work, but on a much smaller scale.
Sun-4 is a series of Unix workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in 1987. The original Sun-4 series were VMEbus-based systems similar to the earlier Sun-3 series, but employing microprocessors based on Sun's own SPARC V7 RISC architecture in place of the 68k family processors of previous Sun models.
In computing, virtualization is the use of a computer to simulate another computer. The following is a chronological list of virtualization technologies.
A page, memory page, or virtual page is a fixed-length contiguous block of virtual memory, described by a single entry in a page table. It is the smallest unit of data for memory management in an operating system that uses virtual memory. Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory pages are mapped by the operating system.
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. Since the original has become obsolete, the term "BSD" is commonly used for its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX).
ptrace is a system call found in Unix and several Unix-like operating systems. By using ptrace one process can control another, enabling the controller to inspect and manipulate the internal state of its target. ptrace is used by debuggers and other code-analysis tools, mostly as aids to software development.
The SPARCstation LX is a workstation that was designed, manufactured, and sold by Sun Microsystems. Introduced in November 1992, it is based on the sun4m architecture and enclosed in a lunchbox chassis. It shares the code name Sunergy with the low-end range of SPARCclassic, SPARCclassic X, and SPARCstation ZX.
Illumos is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device drivers, system libraries, and utility software for system administration. This core is now the base for many different open-sourced Illumos distributions, in a similar way in which the Linux kernel is used in different Linux distributions.
The history of the Berkeley Software Distribution began in the 1970s when University of California, Berkeley received a copy of Unix. Professors and students at the university began adding software to the operating system and released it as BSD to select universities. Since it contained proprietary Unix code, it originally had to be distributed subject to AT&T licenses. The bundled software from AT&T was then rewritten and released as free software under the BSD license. However, this resulted in a lawsuit with Unix System Laboratories, the AT&T subsidiary responsible for Unix. Eventually, in the 1990s, the final versions of BSD were publicly released without any proprietary licenses, which led to many descendants of the operating system that are still maintained today.
