Research Unix

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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).

1 History
2 Versions
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

The term Research Unix first appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal (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 then 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.

[edit] 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 and pipes; total number of installations was 16.
4th Edition	Nov. 1973	First Unix written in C. It also introduced groups. Number of installations was listed as "above 20". The manual was formatted with troff for the first time.
5th Edition	Jun. 1974	Introduced the sticky bit; installations "above 50".
6th Edition	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	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 with an extensively modified kernel with almost 80% more lines of code than V6. In February, a port called 32V was made to DEC's VAX hardware; 32V was the basis for 4BSD.
8th Edition	Feb. 1985	A modified 4.1cBSD (with sockets replaced by STREAMS); used internally
9th Edition	Sep. 1986	Incorporated code from 4.3BSD; used internally
10th Edition	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 1st Edition	1993	successor of Research Unix by largely the same development team (shared many user-level utilities with V10)