Research Unix
Encyclopedia
Research Unix is a term used to refer to versions of the Unix
operating system
for DEC
PDP-7
, PDP-11
, VAX
and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32
computers, developed in the Bell Labs
Computing Science Research Center (frequently referred to as Department 1127).
(Vol. 57, No. 6, Pt. 2 Jul/Aug 1978) to distinguish it from other versions internal to Bell Labs (such as PWB/UNIX
and MERT) whose code-base had diverged from the primary CSRC version. However, that term was little-used until Version 8 Unix
, but has been retroactively
applied to earlier versions as well. Prior to V8, the operating system was most commonly called simply UNIX (in caps) or the UNIX Time-Sharing System.
Because both the early versions and the last few were never officially released outside of Bell Labs, and grew rather organically, Research Unix versions are often referred to by the edition of the manual that describes them. So, the first Research Unix would be the First Edition, and the last the Tenth Edition. Another common way of referring to them is Version x (or Vx) Unix, where x is the manual edition.
All modern editions of Unix (excepting implementations from scratch like Coherent
, Minix
, and Linux
, usually referred to as Unix-like
) derive from the 7th Edition.
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
for DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
PDP-7
PDP-7
The DEC PDP-7 is a minicomputer produced by Digital Equipment Corporation. Introduced in 1965, it was the first to use their Flip-Chip technology. With a cost of only $72,000 USD, it was cheap but powerful by the standards of the time. The PDP-7 was the third of Digital's 18-bit machines, with...
, PDP-11
PDP-11
The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years...
, VAX
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32
Interdata 7/32 and 8/32
The Model 7/32 and Model 8/32 were 32-bit minicomputers developed by Interdata, Inc. of Oceanport, New Jersey during the 1970s. They are primarily remembered for being the first 32-bit minicomputers, and the first non-PDP computers to run Unix...
computers, developed in the Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
Computing Science Research Center (frequently referred to as Department 1127).
History
The term Research Unix first appeared in the Bell System Technical JournalBell System Technical Journal
The Bell System Technical Journal was the in-house scientific journal of Bell Labs that was published from 1922 to 1983.- Notable papers :...
(Vol. 57, No. 6, Pt. 2 Jul/Aug 1978) to distinguish it from other versions internal to Bell Labs (such as PWB/UNIX
PWB/UNIX
The Programmer's Workbench was an early version of the Unix operating system created in the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Group of AT&T....
and MERT) whose code-base had diverged from the primary CSRC version. However, that term was little-used until Version 8 Unix
Version 8 Unix
Eighth Edition Unix, also known as Version 8 Unix or V8, was a version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at Bell Labs and a select number of universities. It was "released" in February 1985, ran on VAX hardware, and was a variant of 4.1cBSD with some System V.1 ...
, but has been retroactively
Retcon
Retroactive continuity is the alteration of previously established facts in a fictional work. Retcons are done for many reasons, including the accommodation of sequels or further derivative works in a series, wherein newer authors or creators want to revise the in-story history to allow a course...
applied to earlier versions as well. Prior to V8, the operating system was most commonly called simply UNIX (in caps) or the UNIX Time-Sharing System.
Because both the early versions and the last few were never officially released outside of Bell Labs, and grew rather organically, Research Unix versions are often referred to by the edition of the manual that describes them. So, the first Research Unix would be the First Edition, and the last the Tenth Edition. Another common way of referring to them is Version x (or Vx) Unix, where x is the manual edition.
All modern editions of Unix (excepting implementations from scratch like Coherent
Coherent (operating system)
The Coherent operating system was a Version 7 Unix clone by the now-defunct Mark Williams Company, originally produced for the PDP-11 in 1980. A port was introduced in 1983 as the first Unix-like system for IBM PC compatible computers....
, Minix
Minix
MINIX is a Unix-like computer operating system based on a microkernel architecture created by Andrew S. Tanenbaum for educational purposes; MINIX also inspired the creation of the Linux kernel....
, and Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, usually referred to as Unix-like
Unix-like
A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....
) derive from the 7th Edition.
Versions
| Manual Edition | Release date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1st Edition | Nov. 3, 1971 | First edition of the Unix manual, based on the version that ran on the PDP-11 at the time. Unix was actually 2 years old at the time and had been ported from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11/20 in 1970. |
| 2nd Edition | Jun. 12, 1972 | Total number of installations at the time was 10, according to the preface of the manual. |
| 3rd Edition | Feb. 1973 | Introduced the C programming language C (programming language) C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system.... and pipes; total number of installations was 16. |
| 4th Edition | Nov. 1973 | First Unix written in C C (programming language) C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system.... . It also introduced groups Group identifier (Unix) In Unix-like systems, multiple users can be categorized into groups. POSIX and conventional Unix file system permissions are organized into three classes, user, group, and others. The use of groups allows additional abilities to be delegated in an organized fashion, such as access to disks,... . Number of installations was listed as "above 20". The manual was formatted with troff Troff troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system.-History:troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF, written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s... for the first time. |
| 5th Edition | Jun. 1974 | Introduced the sticky bit Sticky bit In computing, the sticky bit is an access-right flag that can be assigned to files and directories on Unix systems.-History:The sticky bit was introduced in the Fifth Edition of Unix in 1974 for use with pure executable files. When set, it instructed the operating system to retain the text segment... ; installations "above 50". |
| 6th Edition Version 6 Unix Sixth Edition Unix, also called Version 6 Unix or just V6, was the first version of the Unix operating system to see wide release outside Bell Labs. It was released in May 1975 and, like its direct predecessor, targeted the DEC PDP-11 family of minicomputers... |
May 1975 | First Unix to see widespread distribution outside Bell Labs, as well as the first to be ported to non-PDP hardware. May 1977 saw the release of MINI-UNIX, a "cut down" v6 for the low-end PDP-11/10. |
| 7th Edition Version 7 Unix Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by AT&T in the early 1980s... |
Jan. 1979 | The ancestor of all modern UNIX systems and the last release of Research Unix to see widespread external distributions. Merged together most of the utilities of PWB/UNIX PWB/UNIX The Programmer's Workbench was an early version of the Unix operating system created in the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Group of AT&T.... with an extensively modified kernel with almost 80% more lines of code than V6. In February, a port called 32V UNIX/32V UNIX/32V was an early version of the Unix operating system from Bell Laboratories, released in June 1979. 32V was a direct port of the PDP-11 Seventh Edition Unix to the DEC VAX architecture.... was made to DEC's VAX VAX VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs... hardware; 32V was the basis for 4BSD Berkeley Software Distribution Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995... . |
| 8th Edition Version 8 Unix Eighth Edition Unix, also known as Version 8 Unix or V8, was a version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at Bell Labs and a select number of universities. It was "released" in February 1985, ran on VAX hardware, and was a variant of 4.1cBSD with some System V.1 ... |
Feb. 1985 | A modified 4.1cBSD (with sockets Berkeley sockets The Berkeley sockets application programming interface comprises a library for developing applications in the C programming language that perform inter-process communication, most commonly for communications across a computer network.... replaced by STREAMS STREAMS In computer networking, STREAMS is the native framework in Unix System V for implementing character devices.STREAMS was designed as a modular architecture for implementing full-duplex I/O between kernel or user space processes and device drivers. Its most frequent uses have been in developing... ); used internally |
| 9th Edition Version 9 Unix Ninth Edition Unix, also known as Version 9 Unix or V9, was a version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at the Bell Labs Information Sciences Research Division, "released" in September 1986. V9 was the successor to V8, and the predecessor to the last Research Unix... |
Sep. 1986 | Incorporated code from 4.3BSD; used internally |
| 10th Edition Version 10 Unix Tenth Edition Unix, also known as Version 10 Unix or V10, was the last version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at Bell Labs. "Released" in 1989, it was the successor of V9... |
Oct. 1989 | Last Research Unix; though the manual itself was published outside of AT&T, there was no distribution of the system itself publicly. |
| Plan 9 from Bell Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002... 1st Edition |
1993 | Successor of Research Unix by largely the same development team (shared many user-level utilities with V10) |
See also
- Ancient UNIX SystemsAncient UNIX SystemsAncient UNIX is a term coined by Santa Cruz Operation, to describe early releases of the Unix code base released prior to Unix System III, particularly the Research Unix releases prior to and including Version 7 .After the publication of the Lions' book, work was undertaken to release the earlier...
- Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source CodeLions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source CodeLions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions contains the complete source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel plus a commentary. It is commonly referred to as the Lions book...
- InfernoInferno (operating system)Inferno is a distributed operating system started at Bell Labs, but is now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova Holdings as free software. Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly...
- Another operating system from the same team
External links
- UNIX Evolution (PostScript) by Ian F. Darwin and Geoffrey Collyer
- Unix heritage - More links and source code for some Research Unix versions
- The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System by Dennis M. Ritchie
- The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts by Warren Toomey, School of IT, Bond University
- Full Manual Pages documentation for Research Unix 8th Edition.