Version 7 Unix

From Free net encyclopedia

Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by AT&T in the early 1980s. V7 ran on Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 minicomputers and on the Interdata 8/32.

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, which was the first version to be widely released outside of the Labs. Development of the Research Unix line continued with the Eighth Edition, which incorporated development from 4.1BSD.

V7 was the first truly portable Unix version, and many ports were completed. The first Sun workstations ran a V7 port by Unisoft, and the first version of Xenix was an extended V7. The VAX port of V7, called UNIX/32V, is the indirect ancestor of nearly every Unix system in use today. The group at Wollongong University that produced the V6 port to the Interdata 7/32 ported V7 to that machine as well.

DEC distributed their own version of V7, called V7M (for modified), for the PDP-11. V7M, developed by DEC's original Unix Engineering Group (UEG), contained many fixes to the kernel for the PDP-11 line of computers including support for separate instruction and data spaces, significant work for hardware error recovery, and many device drivers. Much work was put into producing a release that would reliably bootstrap from many tape drives or disk drives. V7M was well respected in the Unix community. UEG evolved into the group that later developed Ultrix.

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