UNIX/32V

UNIX/32V
Developer Bell Laboratories
OS family Unix
Working state Historic
Initial release June 1979
Platforms VAX

UNIX/32V was an early version of the Unix operating system from Bell Laboratories, released in June 1979. 32V was a direct port of the Seventh Edition Unix to the DEC VAX architecture.

Performed by Tom London and John F. Reiser,[1] porting Unix was made possible due to work done between the Sixth and Seventh Editions of the operating system to decouple it from its "native" PDP-11 environment. The 32V team first ported the C compiler (Johnson's pcc), adapting an assembler and loader written for the Interdata 8/32 version of Unix to the VAX. They then ported the April 15, 1978 version of Unix, finding in the process that "[t]he (Bourne) shell [...] required by far the largest conversion effort of any supposedly portable program, for the simple reason that it is not portable."[2]

UNIX/32V was released without paging virtual memory, retaining only the swapping architecture of Seventh Edition. A virtual memory system was added at Berkeley by Bill Joy and Özalp Babaoğlu in order to support Franz Lisp; this was released to other Unix licensees as the Third Berkeley Software Distribution (3BSD) in 1979.[3] Thanks to the popularity of the two systems' successors, 4BSD and UNIX System V, UNIX/32V is an antecedent of nearly all modern Unix systems.

See also

References

  1. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139.
  2. Thomas B. London and John F. Reiser (1978). A Unix operating system for the DEC VAX-11/780 computer. Bell Labs internal memo 78-1353-4.
  3. McKusick, Marshall Kirk (1999). "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable". Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly.

External links