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Research Unix
The original Unix operating system from Bell Labs, developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

Research Unix refers to the early 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 Sciences Research Center (CSRC). The term Research Unix first appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal (Vol. 57, No. 6, Part 2 July/August 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 (1985), 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.

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History

AT&T licensed Version 5 to educational institutions, and Version 6 also to commercial sites. Schools paid $200 and others $20,000, discouraging most commercial use, but Version 6 was the most widely used version into the 1980s. Research Unix versions are often referred to by the edition of the manual that describes them,1 because early versions and the last few were never officially released outside of Bell Labs, and grew organically. So, the first Research Unix would be the First Edition, and the last the Tenth Edition. Another common way of referring to them is as "Version x Unix" or "Vx Unix", where x is the manual edition. All modern editions of Unix—excepting Unix-like implementations such as Coherent, Minix, and Linux—derive from the 7th Edition.

Starting with the 8th Edition, versions of Research Unix had a close relationship to BSD. This began by using 4.1cBSD as the basis for the 8th Edition. In a Usenet post from 2000, Dennis Ritchie described these later versions of Research Unix as being closer to BSD than they were to UNIX System V,2 which also included some BSD code:3

Research Unix 8th Edition started from (I think) BSD 4.1c, but with enormous amounts scooped out and replaced by our own stuff. This continued with 9th and 10th. The ordinary user command-set was, I guess, a bit more BSD-flavored than SysVish, but it was pretty eclectic.

Versions

Manual EditionRelease dateDescription
1st EditionNov 3, 1971First edition of the Unix manual, based on the version that ran on the PDP-11 at the time. The operating system was two years old,4 having been ported from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11/20 in 1970. Includes ar, as, bcd, cal, cat, chdir, chmod, chown, cmp, cp, date, dc, df, du, ed, glob, init, ld, ln, ls, mail, mesg, mkdir, mkfs, mount, mv, nm, od, pr, rm, rmdir, roff, sh, sort, stat, strip, su, sum, tty, umount, wc, who, write; also precursors of fsck, reboot, and adb. The system also had a B and Fortran compiler, a BASIC interpreter, device files and functions for managing punched tape, DECtape, and RK05 disks.
2nd EditionJun 12, 1972Total number of installations at the time was 10, "with more expected", according to the preface of the manual.5: ii  Adds echo, exit, login, m6 macro processor, man, nroff, strip, stty, tmg compiler-compiler and the first C compiler.67
3rd EditionFeb 1973Introduced a C debugger, pipes, crypt, kill, passwd, size, speak, split, uniq, and yacc. Commands are split between /bin and /usr/bin, requiring a search path8 (/usr was the mount point for a second hard disk). Total number of installations was 16.
4th EditionNov 1973First version written in C. Also introduced comm, dump, file, grep, nice, nohup, ps, sleep, sync, tr, wait, and printf(3).9 Included a SNOBOL interpreter. Number of installations was listed as "above 20". The manual was formatted with troff for the first time. Version described in Thompson and Ritchie's CACM paper,10 the first public exposition of the operating system.11
5th EditionJun 1974Licensed to selected educational institutions.12 Introduced col, dd, diff, eqn, find, lpr, pwd, spell, tee, 13 and the sticky bit. Targeted the PDP-11/40 and other 11 models with 18 bit addresses. Installations "above 50".
6th EditionMay 1975Includes ratfor, bc, chgrp, cron, newgrp, ptrace(2), tbl, units, and wall.14 First version widely available outside of Bell Laboratories, licensed to commercial users,15 and to be ported to non-PDP hardware (Interdata 7/32). May 1977 saw the release of MINI-UNIX, a "cut down" v6 for the low-end PDP-11/10.
7th EditionJan 1979Includes the Bourne shell, ioctl(2), stdio(3), and pcc augmenting Dennis Ritchie's C compiler.16 Adds adb, at, awk, banner, basename, cu, diff3, expr, f77, factor, fortune, iostat, join, lex, lint, look, m4, make, rev, sed, tabs, tail, tar, test, touch, true, false, tsort, uucp, uux. The ancestor of UNIX System III and the last release of Research Unix to see widespread external distributions. Merged most of the utilities of PWB/UNIX with an extensively modified kernel with almost 80% more lines of code than V6. Ported to PDP-11, Interdata 8/32 and VAX (UNIX/32V). 32V was the basis for 3BSD.
8th EditionFeb 1985A modified 4.1cBSD for the VAX, with a System V shell and sockets replaced by Streams. Used internally, and only licensed for educational use.17 Adds Berkeley DB, curses(3), cflow, clear, compress, cpio, csh,18 cut, ksh, last, netstat, netnews, seq, telnet, tset, ul, vi, vmstat. The Blit graphics terminal became the primary user interface.19 Includes Lisp, Pascal and Altran. Added a network file system that allowed accessing remote computers' files as /n/hostname/path, and a regular expression library that introduced an API later mimicked by Henry Spencer's reimplementation.20 First version with no assembly in the documentation.21
9th EditionSep 1986Incorporated code from 4.3BSD; used internally. Featured a generalized version of the Streams IPC mechanism introduced in V8. The mount system call was extended to connect a stream to a file, the other end of which could be connected to a (user-level) program. This mechanism was used to implement network connection code in user space.22 Other innovations include Sam.23 According to Dennis Ritchie, V9 and V10 were "conceptual": manuals existed, but no OS distributions "in complete and coherent form".24
10th EditionOct 1989Last Research Unix. Although the manual was published outside of AT&T by Saunders College Publishing,25 there was no full distribution of the system itself.26 Novelties included graphics typesetting tools designed to work with troff, a C interpreter, animation programs, and several tools later found in Plan 9: the Mk build tool and the rc shell. V10 was also the basis for Doug McIlroy and James A. Reeds' multilevel-secure operating system IX.27
Plan 9 1st Edition1992Plan 9 was a successor operating system to Research Unix developed by Bell Laboratories Computing Science Research Center (CSRC).
Inferno Release 1.01997Inferno is a descendant of Plan 9, and shares many design concepts and even source code in the kernel, particularly around devices and the Styx/9P2000 protocol. It shares with Plan 9 the Unix heritage from Bell Labs and the Unix philosophy.

Legacy

In 2002, Caldera International released28 Unix V1, V2, V3, V4, V5, V6, V7 on PDP-11 and Unix 32V on VAX as FOSS under a permissive BSD-like software license.293031

In 2017, The Unix Heritage Society and Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc., on behalf of itself and Nokia Bell Laboratories, released V8, V9, and V10 under the condition that only non-commercial use was allowed, and that they would not assert copyright claims against such use.32

See also

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References

  1. Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. p. 132. Retrieved 30 January 2015. https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-10/1983_10_BYTE_08-10_UNIX#page/n133/mode/2up ↩

  2. Ritchie, Dennis (26 October 2000). "alt.folklore.computers: BSD (Dennis Ritchie)". Retrieved 3 July 2014. http://yarchive.net/comp/bsd.html ↩

  3. Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. p. 132. Retrieved 30 January 2015. https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-10/1983_10_BYTE_08-10_UNIX#page/n133/mode/2up ↩

  4. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  5. Thompson, Ken; Ritchie, Dennis M. (June 12, 1972). UNIX Programmer's Manual, Second Edition (PDF). Bell Telephone Laboratories. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-10-06. https://web.archive.org/web/20161006034736/http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/unix/UnixArchive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/1972_stuff/unix_2nd_edition_manual.pdf ↩

  6. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  7. Thompson, Ken; Ritchie, Dennis M. (June 12, 1972). UNIX Programmer's Manual, Second Edition (PDF). Bell Telephone Laboratories. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-10-06. https://web.archive.org/web/20161006034736/http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/unix/UnixArchive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/1972_stuff/unix_2nd_edition_manual.pdf ↩

  8. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  9. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  10. Ritchie, D. M.; Thompson, K. (1974). "The UNIX Time-Sharing System". Communications of the ACM. 17 (7): 365–375. doi:10.1145/361011.361061. S2CID 53235982. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html ↩

  11. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  12. Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. p. 132. Retrieved 30 January 2015. https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-10/1983_10_BYTE_08-10_UNIX#page/n133/mode/2up ↩

  13. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  14. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  15. Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. p. 132. Retrieved 30 January 2015. https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-10/1983_10_BYTE_08-10_UNIX#page/n133/mode/2up ↩

  16. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  17. Ritchie, Dennis (27 June 2003). "[TUHS] Re: V7 UNIX on VAX 11/750". minnie.tuhs.org. Archived from the original on 2017-03-05. Retrieved 9 April 2014. /wiki/Dennis_Ritchie ↩

  18. "csh". The Unix Heritage Society. n.d. Retrieved December 19, 2022. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/csh ↩

  19. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  20. Spencer, Henry (1986-01-19). "regexp(3)". Newsgroup: mod.sources. Usenet: [email protected]. Retrieved 9 January 2013. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/mod.sources/OqVZYQNSmDs/G_T2jHu5QI8J ↩

  21. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  22. Presotto, David L.; Ritchie, Dennis M. (1990). "Interprocess Communication in the Ninth Edition Unix System". Software: Practice and Experience. 19. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ipcpaper.html ↩

  23. McIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139. /wiki/Doug_McIlroy ↩

  24. Ritchie, Dennis (27 June 2003). "[TUHS] Re: V7 UNIX on VAX 11/750". minnie.tuhs.org. Archived from the original on 2017-03-05. Retrieved 9 April 2014. /wiki/Dennis_Ritchie ↩

  25. "Unix Tenth Edition Manual". Bell Labs. Archived from the original on 3 February 2015. Retrieved 25 December 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20150203070035/http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/10thEdMan/ ↩

  26. Ritchie, Dennis (27 June 2003). "[TUHS] Re: V7 UNIX on VAX 11/750". minnie.tuhs.org. Archived from the original on 2017-03-05. Retrieved 9 April 2014. /wiki/Dennis_Ritchie ↩

  27. "The IX Multilevel-Secure UNIX System". http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/IX/ ↩

  28. Caldera releases original unices under BSD license on slashdot.org (2002) http://slashdot.org/articles/02/01/24/0146248.shtml ↩

  29. "UNIX is free!". lemis.com. 2002-01-24. http://www.lemis.com/grog/UNIX/ ↩

  30. Broderick, Bill (January 23, 2002). "Dear Unix enthusiasts" (PDF). Caldera International. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 February 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20090219220353/http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf ↩

  31. Darwin, Ian F. (2002-02-03). "Why Caldera Released Unix: A Brief History". Linuxdevcenter. O'Reilly Media. Archived from the original on 2004-06-01. Retrieved 2022-01-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20040601025000/http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2002/02/28/caldera.html ↩

  32. Chirgwin, Richard (30 March 2017). "Samizdat no more: Old Unix source code opened for study". The Register. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/30/old_unix_source_code_opened_for_study/ ↩