Research Unix are 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).
History
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, 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.
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.[citation needed]
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:[1]
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.
In 2017, Unix Heritage Society and Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc., on behalf of itself and NokiaBell 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.[16]
PWB/UNIX - A version of Unix for internal use at Bell Labs for production use
References
^ a b c dFiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. p. 132. Retrieved 30 January 2015.
^Ritchie, Dennis (26 October 2000). "alt.folklore.computers: BSD (Dennis Ritchie)". Retrieved 3 July 2014.
^ a b c d e f g h i j kMcIlroy, M. D. (1987). A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986 (PDF) (Technical report). CSTR. Bell Labs. 139.
^ a bThompson, 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.
^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.
^ a b cRitchie, 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.
^Presotto, David L.; Ritchie, Dennis M. (1990). "Interprocess Communication in the Ninth Edition Unix System". Software: Practice and Experience. 19.
^"Unix Tenth Edition Manual". Bell Labs. Archived from the original on 3 February 2015. Retrieved 25 December 2013.
^"The IX Multilevel-Secure UNIX System".
^Caldera releases original unices under BSD license on slashdot.org (2002)
^"UNIX is free!". lemis.com. 2002-01-24.
^Broderick, Bill (January 23, 2002). "Dear Unix enthusiasts" (PDF). Caldera International. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 February 2009.
^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.
^Samizdat no more: Old Unix source code opened for study by Richard Chirgwin on register.com (30 March 2017)
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Research Unix.
UNIX Evolution (PostScript) by Ian F. Darwin and Geoffrey Collyer
Unix heritage - More links and source code for some Research Unix versions