[Usenet; poss. from the variety of prosimian called a slow
loris
. The variant ‘Slowlartus’ is also common, related
to LART] Common hackish term for Solaris, Sun's
System VR4 version of Unix that came out of the standardization wars of the
early 1990s. So named because especially on older hardware, responsiveness
was much less crisp than under the preceding SunOS. Early releases of
Solaris (that is, Solaris 2, as some marketroids at
Sun retroactively rechristened SunOS as Solaris 1) were quite buggy, and
Sun was forced by customer demand to support SunOS for quite some
time. Newer versions are acknowledged to be among the best commercial Unix
variants in 1998, but still lose single-processor benchmarks to Sparc
Linux. Compare HP-SUX,
sun-stools.