1979 minicomputer operating system
This article is about the 1979 Research Unix Operating System. For the Single Unix Specification trademark, see
UNIX V7
.
Operating system
Version 7 Unix
, also called
Seventh Edition 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 Corporation
in the early 1980s. V7 was originally developed for
Digital Equipment Corporation
's
PDP-11
minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms.
Overview
[
edit
]
Unix versions from Bell Labs were designated by the edition of the user's manual with which they were accompanied. Released in 1979, the Seventh Edition was preceded by
Sixth Edition
, which was the first version licensed to commercial users.
[1]
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. As this was the era of
minicomputers
, with their many architectural variations, and also the beginning of the market for 16-bit microprocessors, many ports were completed within the first few years of its release. The first
Sun
workstations (then based on the
Motorola 68000
) ran a V7 port by
UniSoft
;
[2]
the first version of
Xenix
for the
Intel 8086
was derived from V7 and
Onyx Systems
soon produced a
Zilog
Z8000
computer running V7. The
VAX
port of V7, called
UNIX/32V
, was the direct ancestor of the popular
4BSD family
of Unix systems.
The group at the
University of Wollongong
that had
ported V6
to the
Interdata 7/32
ported V7 to that machine as well.
Interdata
sold the port as Edition VII, making it the first commercial UNIX offering.
[
citation needed
]
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.
[3]
UEG evolved into the group that later developed
Ultrix
.
Reception
[
edit
]
Due to its power yet elegant simplicity, many old-time Unix users remember V7 as the pinnacle of Unix development and have dubbed it "the last true Unix", an improvement over all preceding and following Unices. At the time of its release, though, its greatly extended feature set came at the expense of a decrease in performance compared to V6, which was to be corrected largely by the user community.
[4]
The number of
system calls
in Version 7 was only around 50, while later Unix and Unix-like systems continued to add many more:
[5]
Version 7 of the Research UNIX System provided about 50 system calls,
4.4BSD
provided about 110, and
SVR4
had around 120. The exact number of system calls varies depending on the operating system version. More recent systems have seen incredible growth in the number of supported system calls.
Linux
5.15.0 has 449 system calls and
FreeBSD
8.0 has over 450.
Released as free software
[
edit
]
Screenshot of a PDP-11 booting Version 7 Unix in a simulator.
In 2002,
Caldera International
released
[6]
V7 as
FOSS
under a
permissive
BSD-like
software license
.
[7]
[8]
[9]
Bootable images for V7 can still be
downloaded
today, and can be run on modern hosts using PDP-11 emulators such as
SIMH
.
An
x86
port has been developed by Nordier & Associates.
[10]
Paul Allen
maintained
[
when?
]
several publicly accessible historic computer systems, including a PDP-11/70 running Unix Version 7.
New features in Version 7
[
edit
]
Many new features were introduced in Version 7.
The
Portable C Compiler
(pcc) was provided along with the earlier, PDP-11-specific, C compiler by
Ritchie
.
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
.
[11]
- New commands: the
Bourne shell
,
[11]
at,
awk
, calendar,
f77
,
fortune
,
tar
(replacing the tp command), touch
- Networking support, in the form of
uucp
and
Datakit
[11]
- New
system calls
: access, acct, alarm,
chroot
(originally used to test the V7 distribution during preparation
[
citation needed
]
), exece,
ioctl
, lseek (previously only 24-bit offsets were available),
umask
, utime
- New library calls: The new
stdio
routines,
[1]
malloc
, getenv, popen/system
- Environment variables
- A maximum file size of just over one
gigabyte
,
[1]
through a system of indirect addressing
[12]
Multiplexed files
[
edit
]
A feature that did not survive long was a second way (besides pipes) to do
inter-process communication
: multiplexed files. A process could create a special type of file with the
mpx
system call; other processes could then open this file to get a "channel", denoted by a
file descriptor
, which could be used to communicate with the process that created the multiplexed file.
[13]
Mpx files were considered experimental, not enabled in the default kernel,
[14]
and disappeared from later versions, which offered
sockets
(BSD) or
CB UNIX
's IPC facilities (System V) instead
[15]
(although mpx files were still present in 4.1BSD
[16]
).
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
c
Fiedler, David (October 1983).
"The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace"
.
BYTE
. p. 132.
ISSN
0360-5280
.
OCLC
854802500
. Retrieved
2018-09-11
.
- ^
James W. Birdsall.
"The Sun Hardware Reference, Part II"
.
Sun-1's were the very first models ever produced by Sun. The earliest ran Unisoft V7 UNIX; SunOS 1.x was introduced later.
- ^
Canter, Fred.
"V7M 2.1 SPD"
(PDF)
. Digital Equipment Corp
. Retrieved
7 January
2012
.
- ^
Salus, Peter H.
(2005).
The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin
.
Groklaw
.
- ^
Stevens, W Richard. Rago, Stephen A.
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, 3rd Edition.
2013. p. 21
- ^
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 February 19, 2009.
- ^
Darwin, Ian F. (2002-02-03).
"Why Caldera Released Unix: A Brief History"
.
Linuxdevcenter
.
O'Reilly Media
. Archived from
the original
on 2016-01-26
. Retrieved
2016-01-19
.
- ^
https://www.nordier.com/#v7x86
Robert Nordier - UNIX v7/x86
- ^
a
b
c
McIlroy, M. Douglas
(1987).
A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971?1986
(PDF)
(Technical report). Bell Labs. CSTR 139
. Retrieved
2018-07-22
.
- ^
Thompson, Ken
(1978). "UNIX Implementation".
Bell System Technical Journal
.
57
(6): 1931?1946.
doi
:
10.1002/j.1538-7305.1978.tb02137.x
.
S2CID
19423060
.
- ^
mpx(2)
?
Version 7 Unix
Programmer's
Manual
- ^
mkconf(1)
?
Version 7 Unix
Programmer's
Manual
- ^
Leffler, Samuel J.; Fabry, Robert S.;
Joy, William N.
; Lapsley, Phil; Miller, Steve; Torek, Chris (1986).
An Advanced 4.3 BSD Interprocess Communication Tutorial
(Technical report). Computer Systems Research Group, University of California, Berkeley.
- ^
Ritchie, Dennis M.
(1984). "A Stream Input-Output System".
AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal
.
63
(8). AT&T: 1897?1910.
CiteSeerX
10.1.1.48.3730
.
doi
:
10.1002/j.1538-7305.1984.tb00071.x
.
S2CID
33497669
.
External links
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