Version 7 Unix
{{Bell 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. V7 was originally developed for
Digital Equipment Corporation's
PDP-11 minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms.Unix versions from Bell Labs were designated by the edition of the user's manual with which they were accompanied. The Seventh Edition was preceded by
Sixth Edition, which was the first version to be widely distributed outside of the Labs. Development of the
Research Unix line continued with the
Eighth Edition, which incorporated development from
4.1BSD, through the Tenth Edition, after which the Bell Labs researchers concentrated on developing
Plan 9.V7 was the first readily
portable version of Unix, and many ports were completed. The first
Sun workstations ran a V7 port by
UniSoft, and the first version of
Xenix was derived from V7. The
VAX port of V7, called
UNIX/32V, was the direct ancestor of the popular
4BSD family of Unix systems. The group at
Wollongong University that had ported V6 to the
Interdata 7/32 ported V7 to that machine as well.
DEC distributed their own PDP-11 version of V7, called
V7M (for modified). V7M, developed by DEC's original
Unix Engineering Group (UEG), contained many enhancements to the kernel for the PDP-11 line of computers including significantly improved hardware error recovery and many additional device drivers. UEG evolved into the group that later developed
Ultrix.Due to its power yet elegant simplicity, many old-time Unix users fondly (and with a good amount of nostalgia) remember V7 as the pinnacle of Unix development and have dubbed it "the last true Unix," an improvement over all preceding and following Unices.
(1)Released as free software
In 2002,
Caldera Systems released V7 under a
free software license. Bootable images for V7 can still be
downloaded today, and can be run on modern hosts using PDP-11 emulators such as
SIMH.
New features in Version 7
Many new features were introduced in Version 7.
These first appeared in the Research Unix lineage in Version 7, although early versions of some of them had already been picked up by PWB/UNIX.
- New commands: the Bourne shell, at, awk, calendar, f77, fortune, tar (replacing the tp command), touch, uucp
- New system calls: access, acct, alarm, chroot (originally used to test the v7 distribution during preparation), ioctl, lseek (previously only 24-bit offsets were available), umask, utime
- New library calls: The new stdio routines, malloc, getenv, popen/system
References
-
[WEB,weblink A very brief look at Unix history, Timar, Ted, 1994-05-30, www.faqs.org, en, 2008-05-16, ]
See also
External links
Version 7 Unix
(...as imported from WP)
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