UNIX System III
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Company/ developer: |
AT&T |
| OS family: | Unix |
| Source model: | closed |
| Working state: | Historic |
UNIX System III (sometimes called System 3) was a version of the Unix operating system released by AT&T's Unix Support Group (USG). It was first released outside of Bell Labs in 1982. It was an amalgam of various AT&T Unices: PWB/UNIX 2.0, CB UNIX 3.0, UNIX/TS 3.0.1 and UNIX/32V. System III supported the DEC PDP-11 and VAX computers.
The system was apparently called System III because it was considered the outside release of UNIX/TS 3.0.1 and CB UNIX 3, which were internally supported Bell Labs Unices. In fact, its documentation calls it UNIX Edition 3.0. There were no Unix versions called System I or System II. There was no official release of UNIX/TS 4.0 (which would have been System IV) either, so System III was succeeded by System V, based on UNIX/TS 5.0.
System III introduced new features such as named pipes, the uname system call and command, and the run queue, and combined various improvements to Version 7 by outside organizations. However, it did not include notable improvements made in BSD, such as the C shell (csh) and screen editing.
Third-party variants of System III include (early versions of) HP-UX, IRIX, IS/3, PC-UX, SINIX, Venix and Xenix.
