Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
. V7, released in 1979, was the last
Bell Laboratories
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...
release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by
AT&T Corporation
AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...
in the early 1980s. V7 was originally developed for
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...
's
PDP-11
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sol ...
minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms.
Overview
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.
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
Portable may refer to:
General
* Portable building, a manufactured structure that is built off site and moved in upon completion of site and utility work
* Portable classroom, a temporary building installed on the grounds of a school to provide ...
version of Unix. As this was the era of
minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ' ...
s, 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
The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Secto ...
) ran a V7 port by
UniSoft; the first version of
Xenix
Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, ...
for the
Intel 8086
The 8086 (also called iAPX 86) is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus (allo ...
was derived from V7 and
Onyx Systems
Onyx primarily refers to the parallel banded variety of chalcedony, a silicate mineral. Agate and onyx are both varieties of layered chalcedony that differ only in the form of the bands: agate has curved bands and onyx has parallel bands. The c ...
soon produced a
Zilog
Zilog, Inc. is an American manufacturer of microprocessors and 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers. It is also a supplier of application-specific embedded system-on-chip (SoC) products.
Its most famous product is the Z80 series of 8-bit micropro ...
Z8000
The Z8000 ("''zee-'' or ''zed-eight-thousand''") is a 16-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog in early 1979. The architecture was designed by Bernard Peuto while the logic and physical implementation was done by Masatoshi Shima, assisted by a ...
computer running V7. The
VAX port of V7, called
UNIX/32V
UNIX/32V is 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.
Overview
Before 32V, Unix had primarily run on DEC PD ...
, was the direct ancestor of the popular
4BSD family of Unix systems.
The group at the
University of Wollongong
The University of Wollongong (abbreviated as UOW) is an Australian public research university located in the coastal city of Wollongong, New South Wales, approximately 80 kilometres south of Sydney. As of 2017, the university had an enrolment of ...
that had
ported V6 to the
Interdata 7/32
The Model 7/32 and Model 8/32 were 32-bit minicomputers introduced by Perkin-Elmer after they acquired Interdata, Inc., in 1973. Interdata computers are primarily remembered for being the first 32-bit minicomputers under $10,000. The 8/32 was a m ...
ported V7 to that machine as well.
Interdata sold the port as Edition VII, making it the first commercial UNIX offering.
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. UEG evolved into the group that later developed
Ultrix
Ultrix (officially all-caps ULTRIX) is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX, MicroVAX and DECstations.
History
The initial development of Unix occurred on DEC eq ...
.
Reception
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.
The number of
system call
In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system on which it is executed. This may include hardware-related services (for example, acc ...
s in Version 7 was only around 50, while later Unix and Unix-like systems continued to add many more:
Released as free software
In 2002,
Caldera International
Caldera International, Inc., earlier Caldera Systems, was an American software company that existed from 1998 to 2002 and developed and sold Linux- and Unix-based operating system products.
Caldera Systems was created in August 1998 as a spinoff ...
released V7 as
FOSS
Fos or FOSS may refer to:
Companies
* Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company
*Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway
* Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company
Historic houses
* Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), Unite ...
under a
permissive BSD-like software license
A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both sourc ...
.
Bootable images for V7 can still b
downloadedtoday, and can be run on modern hosts using PDP-11 emulators such as
SIMH.
An
x86 port has been developed by Nordier & Associates.
Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, and philanthropist. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation with childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, whic ...
maintained several publicly accessible historic computer systems, including a PDP-11/70 running Unix Version 7.
New features in Version 7
Many new features were introduced in Version 7.
*Programming tools:
lex,
lint, and
make.
The Portable C Compiler (pcc) was provided along with the earlier, PDP-11-specific, C compiler by
Ritchie
Ritchie may refer to:
People Surname
*Adele Ritchie (1874–1930), singer – comic opera, musical comedy and vaudeville
*Albert Ritchie (1876–1936), governor of Maryland 1920 to 1935
*Alistair Ferguson Ritchie (1890–1954), crossword compiler ...
.
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
The Programmer's Workbench (PWB/UNIX) is an early, now discontinued, version of the Unix operating system that had been created in the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Group of AT&T. Its stated goal was to provide a time-sharing working en ...
.
*New commands: the
Bourne shell
The Bourne shell (sh) is a shell command-line interpreter for computer operating systems.
The Bourne shell was the default shell for Version 7 Unix. Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh—which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic l ...
, at,
awk, calendar,
f77,
fortune
Fortune may refer to:
General
* Fortuna or Fortune, the Roman goddess of luck
* Luck
* Wealth
* Fortune, a prediction made in fortune-telling
* Fortune, in a fortune cookie
Arts and entertainment Film and television
* ''The Fortune'' (1931 film) ...
,
tar
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation. Tar can be produced from coal, wood, petroleum, or peat. "a dark brown or black bi ...
(replacing the tp command), touch
*Networking support, in the form of
uucp
UUCP is an acronym of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers.
A command named is one of the pr ...
and
Datakit Datakit is a virtual circuit switch which was developed by Sandy Fraser at Bell Labs for both local-area and wide-area networks, and in widespread deployment by the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs).
Datakit uses a cell relay protocol si ...
*New
system call
In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system on which it is executed. This may include hardware-related services (for example, acc ...
s: access, acct, alarm,
chroot
A chroot on Unix and Unix-like operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children. A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot name (and therefore normal ...
(originally used to test the V7 distribution during preparation), exece,
ioctl
In computing, ioctl (an abbreviation of input/output control) is a system call for device-specific input/output operations and other operations which cannot be expressed by regular system calls. It takes a parameter specifying a request code; ...
, lseek (previously only 24-bit offsets were available),
umask, utime
*New library calls: The new
stdio routines,
malloc
C dynamic memory allocation refers to performing manual memory management for dynamic memory allocation in the C programming language via a group of functions in the C standard library, namely , , , and .
The C++ programming language includes t ...
, getenv, popen/system
*
Environment variables
*A maximum file size of just over one
gigabyte
The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix '' giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.
This definit ...
, through a system of indirect addressing
Multiplexed files
A feature that did not survive long was a second way (besides pipes) to do
inter-process communication
In computer science, inter-process communication or interprocess communication (IPC) refers specifically to the mechanisms an operating system provides to allow the processes to manage shared data. Typically, applications can use IPC, categoriz ...
: 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
In Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a file descriptor (FD, less frequently fildes) is a process-unique identifier ( handle) for a file or other input/output resource, such as a pipe or network socket.
File descriptors typically ha ...
, which could be used to communicate with the process that created the multiplexed file. Mpx files were considered experimental, not enabled in the default kernel, and disappeared from later versions, which offered
sockets (BSD) or
CB UNIX's IPC facilities (System V) instead (although mpx files were still present in 4.1BSD
).
See also
*
Version 6 Unix
Sixth Edition Unix, also called Version 6 Unix or just V6, was the first version of the Unix operating system to see wide release outside Bell Labs. It was released in May 1975 and, like its direct predecessor, targeted the DEC PDP-11 family of ...
*
Seventh Edition Unix terminal interface The Seventh Edition Unix terminal interface is the generalized abstraction, comprising both an application programming interface for programs and a set of behavioural expectations for users, of a terminal as historically available in Seventh Editio ...
*
Ancient UNIX
Ancient UNIX is any early release of the Unix code base prior to Unix System III, particularly the Research Unix releases prior to and including Version 7 (the base for UNIX/32V as well as later developments of AT&T Unix).
After the publica ...
References
External links
Unix Seventh Edition manual(Bell Labs)
Browsable source codePDP Unix Preservation Society
{{Unix-like
Bell Labs Unices
Berkeley Software Distribution
Discontinued operating systems
Free software operating systems
1979 software