Ancient UNIX Systems

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"Ancient UNIX" is a term coined by Santa Cruz Operation (now SCO) to describe early releases of the Unix code base released prior to Unix System III. After the publication of the Lions' book, work was undertaken to release the earlier versions of the codebase. SCO first released the code under a limited educational license, then in January 2002 under the four-clause BSD license. So far wide use has not been made of the code, but it can be used on emulator systems, and Unix Fifth Edition has been ported to the Nintendo Game Boy Advance using a PDP-11 emulation layer.

An example of how open-sourcing the old Unix code bases has affected the modern computing community: the BSD vi text editor was based on code from the ed line editor in those early Unixes. Therefore, "traditional" vi could not be distributed freely, and various work-alikes (such as nvi) were created. Now that this code is no longer encumbered, the "traditional" vi has been adapted for modern Unix-like operating systems.[1]