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Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix
Unix

Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of American Telephone & Telegraph employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna....
 operating system
Operating system

An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by AT&T
AT&T

AT&T Inc. is the largest US provider of both local and long distance telephone services, and Digital subscriber line Internet access. AT&T is the second largest provider of wireless service in the United States, with over 77 million wireless customers, and more than 150 million total customers....
 in the early 1980s. V7 was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
's PDP-11
PDP-11

The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s. Though not explicitly conceived as successor to DEC's PDP-8 computer in the Programmed Data Processor series of computers , the PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many Real-time computing....
 minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms.

Unix versions from Bell Labs were designated by the edition of the user's manual with which they were accompanied.






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Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix
Unix

Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of American Telephone & Telegraph employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna....
 operating system
Operating system

An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by AT&T
AT&T

AT&T Inc. is the largest US provider of both local and long distance telephone services, and Digital subscriber line Internet access. AT&T is the second largest provider of wireless service in the United States, with over 77 million wireless customers, and more than 150 million total customers....
 in the early 1980s. V7 was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
's PDP-11
PDP-11

The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s. Though not explicitly conceived as successor to DEC's PDP-8 computer in the Programmed Data Processor series of computers , the PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many Real-time computing....
 minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms.

Unix versions from Bell Labs were designated by the edition of the user's manual with which they were accompanied. The Seventh Edition was preceded by Sixth Edition
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....
, which was the first version to be widely distributed outside of the Labs. Development of the Research Unix
Research Unix

Research Unix is a term used to refer to versions of the Unix operating system for Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7, PDP-11, VAX and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, developed in the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center ....
 line continued with the Eighth Edition
Version 8 Unix

Eight Edition Unix, also known as Version 8 Unix or V8, was a version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at Bell Labs....
, which incorporated development from 4.1BSD
Berkeley Software Distribution

Berkeley Software Distribution is the Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995....
, through the Tenth Edition, after which the Bell Labs researchers concentrated on developing Plan 9
Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, primarily used for research. It was developed as the research successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002....
.

V7 was the first readily portable
Porting

In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable Computer program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed ....
 version of Unix, and many ports were completed. The first Sun
Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational corporation vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982....
 workstations ran a V7 port by UniSoft
UniSoft

UniSoft Corporation is a former Unix vendor that now works on software for digital television development and broadcast....
, and the first version of Xenix
Xenix

Xenix is a version of the Unix operating system, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and eventually began distributing it as SCO UNIX....
 was derived from V7. The VAX
VAX

VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs....
 port of V7, called UNIX/32V
UNIX/32V

UNIX/32V was an early version of the Unix operating system from Bell Laboratories, released in June 1979. 32V was a direct porting of the PDP-11 Seventh Edition Unix to the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX architecture....
, was the direct ancestor of the popular 4BSD family
Berkeley Software Distribution

Berkeley Software Distribution is the Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995....
 of Unix systems. The group at Wollongong University that had ported V6 to the Interdata 7/32 ported V7 to that machine as well.

DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as 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

Ultrix was the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's native Unix systems. While ultrix is the Latin word for avenger, the name was chosen solely for its sound....
.

Due to its power yet elegant simplicity, many old-time Unix users fondly (and with a good amount of nostalgia) remember V7 as the pinnacle of Unix development and have dubbed it "the last true Unix," an improvement over all preceding and following Unices.

Released as free software


In 2002, Caldera Systems V7 under a free software
Free software

Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware...
 license.

Bootable images for V7 can still be today, and can be run on modern hosts using PDP-11 emulators such as SIMH
SIMH

SIMH is a highly portable, multi-system emulator which runs on Microsoft_Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenVMS, and other operating systems....
.

V7/x86

An x86 port is under active development by Nordier & Associates. The current version is 0.8a. The project has produced a bootable CD image with an installer script.

New features in Version 7

Many new features were introduced in Version 7.
  • Programming tools: lex
    Lex programming tool

    In computer science, lex is a Computer program that generates lexical analysiss . Lex is commonly used with the yacc parser generator. Lex, originally written by Eric Schmidt and Mike Lesk, is the standard lexical analyzer generator on many Unix systems, and a tool exhibiting its behavior is specified as part of the POSIX standard....
    , yacc
    Yacc

    The computer program yacc is a parser generator developed by Stephen C. Johnson at AT&T for the Unix operating system. The name is an acronym for "Yet Another Compiler Compiler." It generates a parsing based on an Formal grammar written in a notation similar to Backus-Naur form....
    , lint, pcc
    Portable C Compiler

    The Portable C Compiler was an early compiler for the C programming language written by Stephen C. Johnson of Bell Labs in mid-1970s—based in part on ideas from earlier work by Alan Snyder in 1973....
    , and make.
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.
  • New commands: the Bourne shell
    Bourne shell

    The Bourne shell, or sh, was the default Unix shell of Version 7 Unix, and replaced the Thompson shell, whose executable file had the same name, sh....
    , at, awk, calendar, f77, fortune, tar
    Tar (file format)

    In computing, tar is both a file format and the name of the program used to handle such files. The format was created in the early days of Unix and standardized by POSIX.1-1988 and later POSIX.1-2001....
     (replacing the tp command), touch, uucp
    UUCP

    UUCP is an abbreviation for Unix to Unix Copy Program. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and communications protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of Computer files, email and netnews between computers....
  • New system call
    System call

    In computing, a system call is the mechanism used by an application program to request service from the kernel based on the Monolithic_kernel or to system servers on operating systems based on the microkernel-structure....
    s: access, acct, alarm, chroot
    Chroot

    A chroot on Unix operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent disk root directory for the current running process and its children....
     (originally used to test the v7 distribution during preparation), ioctl
    Ioctl

    In computing, an ioctl is part of the userspace-to-kernel interface of a conventional operating system. Short for "Input/output control", ioctls are typically employed to allow userspace code to communicate with hardware devices or kernel components....
    , lseek (previously only 24-bit offsets were available), umask
    Umask

    umask is a Command and a Function in POSIX environments which sets the default permission modes for newly created files and directories of the current process....
    , utime
  • New library calls: The new stdio
    Stdio.h

    stdio.h, which stands for "standard C file input/output header", is the header file in the C C standard library that contains macro definitions, constants, and declarations of functions and types used for various standard input and output operations....
     routines, malloc
    Malloc

    In computing, malloc is a subroutine provided in the C and C++'s standard library for performing dynamic memory allocation....
    , getenv, popen/system


See also

  • Version 6 Unix
    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....
  • Ancient UNIX


External links

  • (Bell Labs)