Research Unix - Versions

Versions

Manual Edition Release date Description
1st Edition Nov. 3, 1971 First edition of the Unix manual, based on the version that ran on the PDP-11 at the time. "The system was already well-developed before v1 appeared"; it was actually 2 years old at the time and had been ported from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11/20 in 1970.
2nd Edition Jun. 12, 1972 Total number of installations at the time was 10, according to the preface of the manual.
3rd Edition Feb. 1973 Introduced the C programming language and pipes; total number of installations was 16. Commands were split between /bin and /usr/bin, since the 256 kB hard disk of the development machine was full (/usr was the mountpoint for a second hard disk).
4th Edition Nov. 1973 First Unix written in C. It also introduced groups. Number of installations was listed as "above 20". The manual was formatted with troff for the first time. This is the version described in Thompson and Ritchie's CACM paper, the first public exposition of the operating system.
5th Edition Jun. 1974 Introduced the sticky bit; installations "above 50".
6th Edition May 1975 First Unix to see widespread distribution outside Bell Labs, as well as the first to be ported to non-PDP hardware. May 1977 saw the release of MINI-UNIX, a "cut down" v6 for the low-end PDP-11/10.
7th Edition Jan. 1979 The ancestor of all modern UNIX systems and the last release of Research Unix to see widespread external distributions. Merged together most of the utilities of PWB/UNIX with an extensively modified kernel with almost 80% more lines of code than V6. In February, a port called 32V was made to DEC's VAX hardware; 32V was the basis for 4BSD.
8th Edition Feb. 1985 A modified 4.1cBSD (with sockets replaced by STREAMS); used internally. The Blit graphics terminal became the primary user interface.
9th Edition Sep. 1986 Incorporated code from 4.3BSD; used internally
10th Edition Oct. 1989 Last Research Unix; though the manual itself was published outside of AT&T, there was no distribution of the system itself publicly.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs 1st Edition 1993 Successor of Research Unix by largely the same development team (shared many user-level utilities with V10)

Version 3, Version 4 and Version 5 should not be confused with the UNIX 3.0, UNIX 4.0 and UNIX 5.0 releases by the AT&T UNIX Support Group.

Read more about this topic:  Research Unix

Famous quotes containing the word versions:

    “The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”
    —Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)