Back in 1987, AT&T and Sun announced that they were working together to develop a new release of UNIX, combining the two most commonly used variants at the time - BSD and System V. This new UNIX release would be named UNIX System V Release 4 - SVR4.
In 1991, Sun announced that they were replacing their existing UNIX OS, SunOS, with a new release based on SVR4. SunOS was based on BSD and Sun were starting to run into issues with that variant, and so with an eye to the future Sun announced Solaris 2.
SunOS was then renamed Solaris 1, and each Solaris version was composed of the operating environment (Solaris 2.6, Solaris 7, Solaris 10) and it’s related kernel (SunOS 5.6, SunOS 5.7, SunOS 10). The reason for this strange marketing was that Solaris would refer to the entire operating environment, which included the window manager and other products.
Solaris now uses a single codebase for both SPARC and x86 releases. Previous releases had officially been ported by Sun to the PowerPC and Itanium platforms. Solaris is now one of the most popular UNIX variants, thanks to it’s power, scalability, and many new technologies Sun include with each release.
With the release of OpenSolaris, Sun have finalized the task of open sourcing a powerful enterprise UNIX, enabling even the smallest UNIX consultancy to plan a powerful UNIX infrastructure.
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