Subj : Solaris
To   : Vid Strpic
From : Lawrence Garvin
Date : Sat Oct 21 2000 07:18 am

Vid Strpic said in a message to Lawrence Garvin:

-=> Lawrence Garvin said unto Francois Thunus <=-

 lg>> I have the "Solaris 7" CDROM that got from a free licensing
 lg>> program a couple of years ago (but never installed). I had -no-
 lg>> idea it was actually "Solaris 2.7" .

 SQ> I HAD kinda wondered "Gee, why'd they leap from 2 to 8 so quickly."
 FT> to play catch up with Slackware ?

 LG> I don't think so, Francois. At the time Slackware was still at v2.3

 VS> I don't think so.  Slack 2.3 was released in 1995., and Solaris 8
 VS> was out this year ;>   The actual version is 7.1 (RH is 7.0,
 VS> Mandrake 7.1, SuSe 7.0, and so on ...)

If RedHat is now at 7.0 (I can still only find 6.x shipping...) I'm caught off 
guard there... in February I installed 6.0 and that was the (then) shipping 
version from Dell.

As for the Solaris 7 question... the copyright on the Solaris 7 media is 1998, 
which means that, as previously noted, Slackware was only at version 3.5. 
Solaris shipped 2.6 (the precursor to Solaris 7) in 1997, thus I think it 
highly unlikely that the Solaris numbering had anything remotely to do with 
Slackware numbering.

In fact.. the two weren't even competing products. Up to the point of the free 
Solaris 7 distributions to consumers; there were a miniscule number of Solaris 
on Intel installations. Almost all of them were on Sun Sparc processors -- 
Linux hadn't even been ported to the Sparc at that time. Furthermore, Solaris 
came "with" the purchase of a Sparc-based machine - so the "purchase" of the OS 
was also not an issue -- unless one was buying Solaris on Intel.

As for the Unix on Intel market -- SCO had about a 65% market share all by 
themselves at that time. If ya bought a Pentium and ya wanted Unix.. ya bought 
OpenServer.. that's pretty much how it was until 1997.

 
* Origin: lawrence@fido.eforest.net | The Enchanted Forest (1:106/6018)

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