I was using Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system at school for the last month. I was also told by my professor that it was also Unix operating system. Are Unix and Solaris the same thing? I looked online for screenshots of both and the results are practically identical to each other, as well as the screen I would look at while on-campus. I would like to add Unix and Solaris operating systems to my resume, but I don’t know if it would make sense if they are one in the same. Please help.
What an interesting question! My short answer is that Unix and Linux are not at all the same thing, though Linux evolved from the world of Unix, and that Solaris is indeed a “flavor” or version of Unix from Sun Microsystems.
To understand how they all fit in, including other systems like Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux, we need to dig into the history of Unix and understand its oft-convoluted family tree.
It all starts out with an operating system from the mid 1960s called Multics…
Multics was a mainframe multitasking operating system co-developed by Bell Telephone Labs, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric. Problem was, it was big and complex. Bell Labs withdrew from the project, but a group of BTL folk, notably Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan, wanted to create something with many of the same multitasking capabilities, just simpler to use. They named it “Unix” as a joke, saying “whatever Multics is many of, Unix is just one of”.
In 1973 Ritchie and Kernighan created the “C” programming language and introduced a newly rewritten version of Unix written in the new high-level language, a huge leap from the assembly code that marked all other OS development at the time. AT&T (owners of Bell Telephone Labs) opted to make the Unix source code available to universities, which created a great amount of interest, particularly at the University of California, Berkeley and its Computer Science Research Group.
The CSRG group jumped in head first and really started to add new commands and capabilities, along with rewriting many of the lowest level portions of the operating system, releasing their version as BSD Unix, the Berkeley Software Distribution. This lead to a huge headache, actually, and a schism in Unix development, with AT&T claiming copyright infringement and UC Berkeley eventually rallying free software developers to rewrite every line of questionable BSD Unix code to make it “AT&T free”. (I know, I was a contributor to the effort)
Sun Microsystems was founded by three Stanford graduate students, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, but a fourth person joined quickly thereafter: Berkeley Unix developer Bill Joy.
With that team, it’s no surprise that the early generations of SunOS (eventually rebranded Solaris) were based on BSD Unix, but in 1991 Sun changed the internals of SunOS (Solaris) from Berkeley Unix to AT&T’s SVR4 Unix. This was the great SunOS 4 –> SunOS 5 (aka Solaris to Solaris 2) migration.
That same year, a Finnish software developer named Linus Torvalds started developing his own lightweight mini-Unix specifically for PCs that he called “Linux” (though he initially wanted to call it “Freax”, actually)
Finally, Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel with “BSD additions” thrown in and its own Aqua graphical interface. Mach, for its own part, is said to be “compatible with” Unix, created to be a replacement for the BSD Unix kernel (lowest levels of the operating system).
Frankly, this makes my head spin and I’ve been involved with Unix since 1980. To your question “is Solaris Unix?” the answer is “yes, definitely”. Should you put both Solaris and Unix on your resume? I think that’s a good idea. And add Linux too, for good luck.
You are absolutely right, Scott, and my apologies to Ken for the omission. Ken Thompson was definitely part of the triumvirate of geeks at Bell Labs who created Unix.
Dave & Guys or Girls of today,
Thanks for all the contributions.
I am kind of a newbie, 70’s It’s been a few years passing but I recall Unix OS and using GUI for programming HVAC systems and using “C” to create a functional operating software for Access controls, Motor controls and so on back in the day,
I do not consider myself to be a geek, however I really do appreciate those who do and have helped to pave the way for me & others like me in the blue collar world.
My hat goes off to Bill Joy for Unix & Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan for the “C” programming language.
True pioneers!
I am a true believer that so called UNIX Kernel has truly transcended thru Linux OS.
Thanks Guy’s & Gal’s.
Digit!
I could be mistaken but shouldn’t your first paragraph contain Ken Thompson, whom actually coded UNIX in August 1969? I totally agree with including Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan but Ken Thompson deserves equal billing from what I know of the history of UNIX.
I think the answer kind of misses the point of the question.
The user interfaces that the questioner experienced are similar because many unix and unix-like systems, while they may diverge substantially at the lower levels of the OS, use the same handful of user interface systems. Almost all are based on X11 or derivatives like X.org, and the most popular these days are the open-source KDE and Gnome.
So when someone says they’ve learned “unix”, they could be talking about any of a number of different things. Have they learned how to manipulate one of the common unix GUI systems? Have they learned the general principles of unix and unix-like OSes? Have they mastered the subtleties of one particular one?
For starters, someone who isn’t able to recognize the complexity of the original question probably shouldn’t be putting themselves down as an expert on their CV.
Thanks for the nice history lesson. It was short, sweet, and pretty accurate as far as I can remember. But you have shown me why so many tech support agents are clueless about so much. If you recommend that someone who has used “Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system
at school for the last month” to put Solaris, Unix and Linux on their resume you perpetuate the problem. Not only does using any OS in school for a month NOT qualify you as any kind of expert, it does not qualify you as an expert by association to other OSs. He might as well claim all flavors of Windows to since he probably walked past a Windows based PC in the last month too.
Now that I think of it, what 30 day experiences did you list on your last resume?
Please keep up the good work and the blog but tone down the rhetoric.
Don’t forget that the Mac OS/X is based on a Unix-like kernel. (And Xenix was Microsoft’s version back in the 1980’s and 90’s.) Over the decades, I’ve seen many “Unix like” systems come and go. (We have a commercial software product that runs on Unix and “Unix-like” systems.) As I recall, unless you licensed the AT&T source code, you couldn’t call it “Unix”, as that is trademarked.
I remember an article in the mid 1970’s (probably in Propular Computing or Popular Electronics, as I recall) that discussed Unix. As a young computer geek, I practically drooled over the features compared to our relatively primitive HP-3000 O/S.
Dave, this is a really comprehensive answer. When I first got into Unix 20 years ago, if you hadn’t been on a Unix course, understanding Unix was pretty tough. Now with the www and excellent blogs like this, useful information is accessible to all. Many thanks. Vince