Slowlaris /slo'-lahr-is/ n.
[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
AIDX, HP-SUX, Nominal Semidestructor, Telerat, sun-stools.