On 3/26/2018 12:19 PM, Paul Winalski wrote:
>   Unix, on the
> other hand, has always struck me as being less concerned with backward
> compatibility and more about innovation and experimentation.
For Sun, it was quite the contrary.

It was normal to run binaries from SunOS on Solaris. For the longest 
time, the "xv" binary I used on SPARC hardware was compiled on SunOS. 
It's even an X-windows application, and the libraries work.

Even in Solaris 10, it still runs:

-bash-3.00$ ./xv.sparc
ld.so.1: xv.sparc: warning: /usr/4lib/libX11.so.4.3: has older revision 
than expected 10
ld.so.1: xv.sparc: warning: /usr/4lib/libc.so.1.9: has older revision 
than expected 160
-bash-3.00$ file xv.sparc
xv.sparc:       Sun demand paged SPARC executable dynamically linked
-bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS redacted 5.10 Generic_120011-11 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise


This has been deprecated as of Solaris 11, supposedly. Backwards 
compatibility for Solaris binaries is also a "thing".

art k.