fbpx
Wikipedia

Research Unix

April 11, 2024

The term "Research Unix" refers to early 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 Sciences Research Center (CSRC).

History edit

 
Version 7 Unix for the PDP-11, running in SIMH

The term Research Unix first appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal (Vol. 57, No. 6, Part 2 July/August 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.

AT&T licensed Version 5 to educational institutions, and Version 6 also to commercial sites. Schools paid $200 and others $20,000, discouraging most commercial use, but Version 6 was the most widely used version into the 1980s. Research Unix versions are often referred to by the edition of the manual that describes them,[1] because early versions and the last few were never officially released outside of Bell Labs, and grew organically. So, the first Research Unix would be the First Edition, and the last the Tenth Edition. Another common way of referring to them is as "Version x Unix" or "Vx Unix", where x is the manual edition. All modern editions of Unix—excepting Unix-like implementations such as Coherent, Minix, and Linux—derive from the 7th Edition.[citation needed]

Starting with the 8th Edition, versions of Research Unix had a close relationship to BSD. This began by using 4.1cBSD as the basis for the 8th Edition. In a Usenet post from 2000, Dennis Ritchie described these later versions of Research Unix as being closer to BSD than they were to UNIX System V,[2] which also included some BSD code:[1]

Research Unix 8th Edition started from (I think) BSD 4.1c, but with enormous amounts scooped out and replaced by our own stuff. This continued with 9th and 10th. The ordinary user command-set was, I guess, a bit more BSD-flavored than SysVish, but it was pretty eclectic.

Versions edit

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. The operating system was two years old,[3] having been ported from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11/20 in 1970. Includes ar, as, bcd, cal, cat, chdir, chmod, chown, cmp, cp, date, dc, df, du, ed, find, glob, init, ld, ln, ls, mail, mesg, mkdir, mkfs, mount, mv, nm, od, pr, rm, rmdir, roff, sh, sort, stat, strip, su, sum, tty, umount, wc, who, write; also precursors of fsck, reboot, and adb. The system also had a B and Fortran compiler, a BASIC interpreter, device files and functions for managing punched tape, DECtape, and RK05 disks.
2nd Edition Jun 12, 1972 Total number of installations at the time was 10, "with more expected", according to the preface of the manual.[4]: ii  Adds echo, exit, login, m6 macro processor, man, nroff, strip, stty, tmg compiler-compiler and the first C compiler.[3][4]
3rd Edition Feb 1973 Introduced a C debugger, pipes, crypt, kill, passwd, ps, size, speak, split, uniq, and yacc. Commands are split between /bin and /usr/bin, requiring a search path[3] (/usr was the mount point for a second hard disk). Total number of installations was 16.
4th Edition Nov 1973 First version written in C. Also introduced comm, dump, file, grep, nice, nohup, sleep, sync, tr, wait, and printf(3).[3] Included a SNOBOL interpreter. Number of installations was listed as "above 20". The manual was formatted with troff for the first time. Version described in Thompson and Ritchie's CACM paper,[5] the first public exposition of the operating system.[3]
5th Edition Jun 1974 Licensed to selected educational institutions.[1] Introduced col, dd, diff, eqn, lpr, pwd, spell, tee, [3] and the sticky bit. Targeted the PDP-11/40 and other 11 models with 18 bit addresses. Installations "above 50".
6th Edition May 1975 Includes ratfor, bc, chgrp, cron, newgrp, ptrace(2), tbl, units, and wall.[3] First version widely available outside of Bell Laboratories, licensed to commercial users,[1] and to be ported to non-PDP hardware (Interdata 7/32). May 1977 saw the release of MINI-UNIX, a "cut down" v6 for the low-end PDP-11/10.
7th Edition Jan 1979 Includes the Bourne shell, ioctl(2), stdio(3), and pcc augmenting Dennis Ritchie's C compiler.[3] Adds adb, at, awk, banner, basename, cu, diff3, expr, f77, factor, fortune, iostat, join, lex, lint, look, m4, make, rev, sed, tabs, tail, tar, test, touch, true, false, tsort, uucp, uux. The ancestor of UNIX System III and the last release of Research Unix to see widespread external distributions. Merged most of the utilities of PWB/UNIX with an extensively modified kernel with almost 80% more lines of code than V6. Ported to PDP-11, Interdata 8/32 and VAX (UNIX/32V). 32V was the basis for 3BSD.
8th Edition Feb 1985[citation needed] A modified 4.1cBSD[citation needed] for the VAX, with a System V shell and sockets replaced[citation needed] by Streams. Used internally, and only licensed for educational use.[6] Adds Berkeley DB, curses(3), cflow, clear, compress, cpio, csh,[7] cut, ksh[citation needed], last, netstat, netnews, seq, telnet, tset, ul, vi, vmstat. The Blit graphics terminal became the primary user interface.[3] Includes Lisp, Pascal and Altran. Added a network file system that allowed accessing remote computers' files as /n/hostname/path, and a regular expression library that introduced an API later mimicked by Henry Spencer's reimplementation.[8] First version with no assembly in the documentation.[3]
9th Edition Sep 1986 Incorporated code from 4.3BSD; used internally. Featured a generalized version of the Streams IPC mechanism introduced in V8. The mount system call was extended to connect a stream to a file, the other end of which could be connected to a (user-level) program. This mechanism was used to implement network connection code in user space.[9] Other innovations include Sam.[3] According to Dennis Ritchie, V9 and V10 were "conceptual": manuals existed, but no OS distributions "in complete and coherent form".[6]
10th Edition Oct 1989 Last Research Unix. Although the manual was published outside of AT&T by Saunders College Publishing,[10] there was no full distribution of the system itself.[6] Novelties included graphics typesetting tools designed to work with troff, a C interpreter, animation programs, and several tools later found in Plan 9: the Mk build tool and the rc shell. V10 was also the basis for Doug McIlroy and James A. Reeds' multilevel-secure operating system IX.[11]
Plan 9 1st Edition 1992 Plan 9 was a successor operating system to Research Unix developed by Bell Laboratories Computing Science Research Center (CSRC).

Legacy edit

In 2002, Caldera International released[12] Unix V1, V2, V3, V4, V5, V6, V7 on PDP-11 and Unix 32V on VAX as FOSS under a permissive BSD-like software license.[13][14][15]

In 2017, Unix Heritage Society and Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc., on behalf of itself and Nokia Bell Laboratories, released V8, V9, and V10 under the condition that only non-commercial use was allowed, and that they would not assert copyright claims against such use.[16]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b c d Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. p. 132. Retrieved 30 January 2015.
  2. ^ Ritchie, Dennis (26 October 2000). "alt.folklore.computers: BSD (Dennis Ritchie)". Retrieved 3 July 2014.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139.
  4. ^ a b Thompson, Ken; Ritchie, Dennis M. (June 12, 1972). (PDF). Bell Telephone Laboratories. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-10-06.
  5. ^ Ritchie, D. M.; Thompson, K. (1974). "The UNIX Time-Sharing System". Communications of the ACM. 17 (7): 365–375. doi:10.1145/361011.361061. S2CID 53235982.
  6. ^ a b c Ritchie, Dennis (27 June 2003). . minnie.tuhs.org. Archived from the original on 2017-03-05. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  7. ^ "csh". The Unix Heritage Society. n.d. Retrieved December 19, 2022.
  8. ^ Spencer, Henry (1986-01-19). "regexp(3)". Newsgroup: mod.sources. Usenet: 1316@panda.UUCP. Retrieved 9 January 2013.
  9. ^ Presotto, David L.; Ritchie, Dennis M. (1990). "Interprocess Communication in the Ninth Edition Unix System". Software: Practice and Experience. 19.
  10. ^ . Bell Labs. Archived from the original on 3 February 2015. Retrieved 25 December 2013.
  11. ^ "The IX Multilevel-Secure UNIX System".
  12. ^ Caldera releases original unices under BSD license on slashdot.org (2002)
  13. ^ "UNIX is free!". lemis.com. 2002-01-24.
  14. ^ Broderick, Bill (January 23, 2002). (PDF). Caldera International. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 February 2009.
  15. ^ Darwin, Ian F. (2002-02-03). . Linuxdevcenter. O'Reilly Media. Archived from the original on 2004-06-01. Retrieved 2022-01-18.
  16. ^ Samizdat no more: Old Unix source code opened for study by Richard Chirgwin on register.com (30 March 2017)

External links edit

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Research Unix.
  • 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.
  • List of new features in Research Unix 9th Edition.
  • Emulator for running UNIX v9.

April 11, 2024
research, unix, term, refers, early, versions, unix, operating, system, interdata, computers, developed, bell, labs, computing, sciences, research, center, csrc, contents, history, versions, legacy, also, references, external, linkshistory, edit, nbsp, version. The term Research Unix refers to early 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 Sciences Research Center CSRC Contents 1 History 2 Versions 3 Legacy 4 See also 5 References 6 External linksHistory edit nbsp Version 7 Unix for the PDP 11 running in SIMHThe term Research Unix first appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal Vol 57 No 6 Part 2 July August 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 AT amp T licensed Version 5 to educational institutions and Version 6 also to commercial sites Schools paid 200 and others 20 000 discouraging most commercial use but Version 6 was the most widely used version into the 1980s Research Unix versions are often referred to by the edition of the manual that describes them 1 because early versions and the last few were never officially released outside of Bell Labs and grew organically So the first Research Unix would be the First Edition and the last the Tenth Edition Another common way of referring to them is as Version x Unix or Vx Unix where x is the manual edition All modern editions of Unix excepting Unix like implementations such as Coherent Minix and Linux derive from the 7th Edition citation needed Starting with the 8th Edition versions of Research Unix had a close relationship to BSD This began by using 4 1cBSD as the basis for the 8th Edition In a Usenet post from 2000 Dennis Ritchie described these later versions of Research Unix as being closer to BSD than they were to UNIX System V 2 which also included some BSD code 1 Research Unix 8th Edition started from I think BSD 4 1c but with enormous amounts scooped out and replaced by our own stuff This continued with 9th and 10th The ordinary user command set was I guess a bit more BSD flavored than SysVish but it was pretty eclectic Versions editManual Edition Release date Description1st Edition Nov 3 1971 First edition of the Unix manual based on the version that ran on the PDP 11 at the time The operating system was two years old 3 having been ported from the PDP 7 to the PDP 11 20 in 1970 Includes ar as bcd cal cat chdir chmod chown cmp cp date dc df du ed find glob init ld ln ls mail mesg mkdir mkfs mount mv nm od pr rm rmdir roff sh sort stat strip su sum tty umount wc who write also precursors of fsck reboot and adb The system also had a B and Fortran compiler a BASIC interpreter device files and functions for managing punched tape DECtape and RK05 disks 2nd Edition Jun 12 1972 Total number of installations at the time was 10 with more expected according to the preface of the manual 4 ii Adds echo exit login m6 macro processor man nroff strip stty tmg compiler compiler and the first C compiler 3 4 3rd Edition Feb 1973 Introduced a C debugger pipes crypt kill passwd ps size speak split uniq and yacc Commands are split between bin and usr bin requiring a search path 3 usr was the mount point for a second hard disk Total number of installations was 16 4th Edition Nov 1973 First version written in C Also introduced comm dump file grep nice nohup sleep sync tr wait and a href Printf html title Printf printf a 3 3 Included a SNOBOL interpreter Number of installations was listed as above 20 The manual was formatted with troff for the first time Version described in Thompson and Ritchie s CACM paper 5 the first public exposition of the operating system 3 5th Edition Jun 1974 Licensed to selected educational institutions 1 Introduced col dd diff eqn lpr pwd spell tee 3 and the sticky bit Targeted the PDP 11 40 and other 11 models with 18 bit addresses Installations above 50 6th Edition May 1975 Includes a href Ratfor html title Ratfor ratfor a bc chgrp cron newgrp ptrace 2 tbl units and wall 3 First version widely available outside of Bell Laboratories licensed to commercial users 1 and to be ported to non PDP hardware Interdata 7 32 May 1977 saw the release of MINI UNIX a cut down v6 for the low end PDP 11 10 7th Edition Jan 1979 Includes the Bourne shell a href Ioctl html title Ioctl ioctl a 2 a href Stdio html class mw redirect title Stdio stdio a 3 and a href Portable C Compiler html title Portable C Compiler pcc a augmenting Dennis Ritchie s C compiler 3 Adds adb at awk banner basename cu diff3 expr f77 factor fortune iostat join lex lint look m4 make rev sed tabs tail tar test touch true false tsort uucp uux The ancestor of UNIX System III and the last release of Research Unix to see widespread external distributions Merged most of the utilities of PWB UNIX with an extensively modified kernel with almost 80 more lines of code than V6 Ported to PDP 11 Interdata 8 32 and VAX UNIX 32V 32V was the basis for 3BSD 8th Edition Feb 1985 citation needed A modified 4 1cBSD citation needed for the VAX with a System V shell and sockets replaced citation needed by Streams Used internally and only licensed for educational use 6 Adds Berkeley DB curses 3 cflow clear compress cpio csh 7 cut ksh citation needed last netstat netnews seq telnet tset ul vi vmstat The Blit graphics terminal became the primary user interface 3 Includes Lisp Pascal and Altran Added a network file system that allowed accessing remote computers files as n i hostname i i path i and a regular expression library that introduced an API later mimicked by Henry Spencer s reimplementation 8 First version with no assembly in the documentation 3 9th Edition Sep 1986 Incorporated code from 4 3BSD used internally Featured a generalized version of the Streams IPC mechanism introduced in V8 The mount system call was extended to connect a stream to a file the other end of which could be connected to a user level program This mechanism was used to implement network connection code in user space 9 Other innovations include a href Sam text editor html title Sam text editor Sam a 3 According to Dennis Ritchie V9 and V10 were conceptual manuals existed but no OS distributions in complete and coherent form 6 10th Edition Oct 1989 Last Research Unix Although the manual was published outside of AT amp T by Saunders College Publishing 10 there was no full distribution of the system itself 6 Novelties included graphics typesetting tools designed to work with troff a C interpreter animation programs and several tools later found in Plan 9 the Mk build tool and the rc shell V10 was also the basis for Doug McIlroy and James A Reeds multilevel secure operating system IX 11 Plan 9 1st Edition 1992 Plan 9 was a successor operating system to Research Unix developed by Bell Laboratories Computing Science Research Center CSRC Legacy editIn 2002 Caldera International released 12 Unix V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 on PDP 11 and Unix 32V on VAX as FOSS under a permissive BSD like software license 13 14 15 In 2017 Unix Heritage Society and Alcatel Lucent USA Inc on behalf of itself and Nokia Bell Laboratories released V8 V9 and V10 under the condition that only non commercial use was allowed and that they would not assert copyright claims against such use 16 See also editAncient UNIX History of Unix Inferno Another operating system from the same team Lions Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition with Source Code PWB UNIX A version of Unix for internal use at Bell Labs for production useReferences edit a b c d Fiedler Ryan October 1983 The Unix Tutorial Part 3 Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace BYTE p 132 Retrieved 30 January 2015 Ritchie Dennis 26 October 2000 alt folklore computers BSD Dennis Ritchie Retrieved 3 July 2014 a b c d e f g h i j k McIlroy M D 1987 A Research Unix reader annotated excerpts from the Programmer s Manual 1971 1986 PDF Technical report CSTR Bell Labs 139 a b Thompson Ken Ritchie Dennis M June 12 1972 UNIX Programmer s Manual Second Edition PDF Bell Telephone Laboratories Archived from the original PDF on 2016 10 06 Ritchie D M Thompson K 1974 The UNIX Time Sharing System Communications of the ACM 17 7 365 375 doi 10 1145 361011 361061 S2CID 53235982 a b c Ritchie Dennis 27 June 2003 TUHS Re V7 UNIX on VAX 11 750 minnie tuhs org Archived from the original on 2017 03 05 Retrieved 9 April 2014 csh The Unix Heritage Society n d Retrieved December 19 2022 Spencer Henry 1986 01 19 regexp 3 Newsgroup mod sources Usenet 1316 panda UUCP Retrieved 9 January 2013 Presotto David L Ritchie Dennis M 1990 Interprocess Communication in the Ninth Edition Unix System Software Practice and Experience 19 Unix Tenth Edition Manual Bell Labs Archived from the original on 3 February 2015 Retrieved 25 December 2013 The IX Multilevel Secure UNIX System Caldera releases original unices under BSD license on slashdot org 2002 UNIX is free lemis com 2002 01 24 Broderick Bill January 23 2002 Dear Unix enthusiasts PDF Caldera International Archived from the original PDF on 19 February 2009 Darwin Ian F 2002 02 03 Why Caldera Released Unix A Brief History Linuxdevcenter O Reilly Media Archived from the original on 2004 06 01 Retrieved 2022 01 18 Samizdat no more Old Unix source code opened for study by Richard Chirgwin on register com 30 March 2017 External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Research Unix 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 List of new features in Research Unix 9th Edition Emulator for running UNIX v9 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Research Unix amp oldid 1209798808, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.