Back in 1987, AT&T and Sun said that the two companies were working together to create a new release of UNIX, merging the two most commonly used releases at the time - BSD and System V. This new UNIX release would be called 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 beginning to run into issues with that release, and so with an eye to the future Sun announced Solaris 2.

SunOS was then renamed Solaris 1, and each Solaris variant was made up 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 odd naming was that Solaris would refer to the complete operating environment, which included the window manager and other products.

Solaris now uses a shared codebase for both SPARC and x86 versions. Previous versions had officially been ported by Sun to the PowerPC and Itanium platforms. Solaris is now one of the most common UNIX releases, thanks to it’s power, scalability, and many new technologies Sun include with each release.

With the release of OpenSolaris, Sun have completed the process of open sourcing a powerful enterprise UNIX, enabling even the smallest UNIX consultancy to plan a cost effective UNIX infrastructure.

Although best known for it’s powerful graphics desktops and massive servers, Silicon Graphics regularly produces related items of high technology. Back in 1998, Silicon Graphics gave the display industry a swift kick by launching the ground breaking 1600SW display.

The SGI 1600SW is a TFT display with a resolution of 1600×1024. It was, and remains, the only display to offer a full 16:10 aspect ratio, allowing precise work for computer effects artists, as well as being able to show two A4 pages of text side by side. The 1600SW won several awards for it’s innovative design, and the display’s brightness and high resolution still places it at the top end of display design, over 10 years later.

The display used the all digital OpenLDI interface, which required special graphics cards. Several models of Silicon Graphics computer had the required connector either builtin, or available as an add-in card. Companies like 3D Labs also produced dedicated graphics cards with the special connector, allowing the 1600SW display to be used with standard PCs.

Since it’s introduction, many companies have also produced convertors, allowing modern video cards to be used with the OpenLDI interface. Over a decade after it’s introduction, the Silicon Graphics 1600SW remains a high quality display that is very sought after by graphics professionals.

Silicon Graphics is best recognised as a hardware company, with a long and glorious history of technological innovation, award winning products, and powerful graphics. Less well known is the huge amount of software produced by Silicon Graphics. Along with normal products such as compilers and graphics programs, Silicon Graphics also contribute a lot to Open Source projects.

The companies’ latest software suite, however, represents a major departure for Silicon Graphics. The VUE suite is a collection of tools that, at it’s core, allows remote visualisation. Using VUE users are able to show complex graphics on devices as simple as PDAs and laptops.

VUE stands for Visual User Experience, and is composed of five separate software tools.

FusionVUE combines multiple sources of information, producing an easy to use graphical display. SoftVUE converts any standard platform into part of a visualisation and computing platform. PowerVUE provides powerful realtime visualisation. RemoteVUE allows the remote display of complex graphics. Finally, EventVUE provides a realtime graphical overview of complex situations or events.

It’s clear that the VUE suite has the potential to replace many expensive workstations on users’ desks, relying instead on the power of a expensive compute system in a data centre. Playing to many of Silicon Graphics recent strengths, the VUE suite heralds a return to Silicon Graphics groundbreaking lead in computer graphics.