Developer | AT&T Bell Laboratories |
---|---|
Written in | C, assembly |
OS family | Unix |
Working state | Historic |
Source model | Open source |
Initial release | May 1975 |
Marketing target | Minicomputers |
Available in | English |
Platforms | DEC PDP-11 |
Default user interface | Command-line interface (Thompson shell) |
License | Originally proprietary commercial software, now free software under a BSD License |
Preceded by | Version 5 Unix |
Succeeded by | Version 7 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. It was released in May 1975 and, like its direct predecessor, targeted the DEC PDP-11 family of minicomputers. It was superseded by Version 7 Unix in 1978/1979, although V6 systems remained in regular operation until at least 1985. [1]
AT&T Corporation licensed Version 5 Unix to educational institutions only, but licensed Version 6 also to commercial users for $20,000, and it remained the most widely used version into the 1980s. [2] An enhanced V6 was the basis of the first ever commercially sold Unix version, INTERACTIVE's IS/1. Bell's own PWB/UNIX 1.0 was also based on V6, where earlier (unreleased) versions were based on V4 and V5. Whitesmiths produced and marketed a (binary-compatible) V6 clone under the name Idris.
V6 Unix was released as a distribution including the full source code. Since source code was available and the license was not explicit enough to forbid it, V6 was taken up as a teaching tool, notably by the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University and the University of New South Wales (UNSW).
UC Berkeley distributed a set of add-on programs called the First Berkeley Software Distribution or 1BSD, which later became a complete operating system distribution.
UNSW professor John Lions' famous Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition was an edited selection of the main parts of the kernel as implemented for a Digital PDP-11/40, and was the main source of kernel documentation for many early Unix developers. Due to license restrictions on later Unix versions, the book was mainly distributed by samizdat photo-copying.
The source code for the original V6 Unix was later made available as free software under a BSD License from the SCO Group. [3]
In 1977, Richard Miller and Ross Nealon, working under the supervision of professor Juris Reinfelds at Wollongong University, completed a port of V6 Unix to the Interdata 7/32, [4] [5] thus proving the portability of Unix and its new systems programming language C in practice. Their "Wollongong Interdata UNIX, Level 6" also included utilities developed at Wollongong, and later releases had features of V7, notably its C compiler. Wollongong Unix was the first ever port to a platform other than the PDP series of computers, proving that portable operating systems were indeed feasible, and that C was the language in which to write them. In 1980, this version was licensed to The Wollongong Group in Palo Alto that published it as Edition 7.
Around the same time, a Bell Labs port to the Interdata 8/32 was completed, but not externally released. The goal of this port was to improve the portability of Unix more generally, as well to produce a portable version of the C compiler. [6] The resulting Portable C Compiler (PCC) was distributed with V7 and many later versions of Unix, and was used to produce the UNIX/32V port to the VAX. [7]
A third Unix portability project was completed at Princeton, NJ in 1976–1977, where the Unix kernel was adapted to run as a guest operating on IBM's VM/370 virtualization environment. [6] This version became the nucleus of Amdahl's first internal UNIX offering. (see Amdahl UTS)
Bell Labs developed several variants of V6, including the stripped-down MINI-UNIX for low-end PDP-11 models, LSI-UNIX or LSX for the LSI-11, and the real-time operating system UNIX/RT, which merged V6 Unix and the earlier MERT hypervisor. [8]
After AT&T decided the distribution by Bell Labs of a number of pre-V7 bug fixes would constitute support (disallowed by an antitrust settlement) a tape with the patchset was slipped to Lou Katz of USENIX, who distributed them. [9]
The University of Sydney released the Australian Unix Share Accounting Method (AUSAM) in January 1978, a V6 variant with improved security and process accounting, in addition to the fifty fixes that leaked out of Bell Labs. There were several subsequent releases.
Interactive Systems Corporation released an enhanced PDP-11 version for office automation called IS/1. [10]
In the Eastern Bloc, clones of V6 Unix appeared for local-built PDP-11 clones (MNOS, later augmented for partial compatibility with BSD Unix) and for the Elektronika BK personal computer (BKUNIX, based on LSX).
V6 was used for teaching at MIT in 2002 through 2006, and subsequently replaced by a simpler clone called xv6.
AIX is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM since 1986. The name stands for "Advanced Interactive eXecutive". Current versions are designed to work with Power ISA based server and workstation computers such as IBM's Power line.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has been free and open-source. The final official release was in early 2015.
A Commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System by John Lions is a highly influential 1976 publication containing analytical commentary on the source code of the 6th Edition Unix computer operating system "resident nucleus" software, plus copy formatted and indexed by Lions, of said source code obtained from the authors at AT&T Bell Labs.
Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and eventually replaced it with SCO UNIX.
The Bourne shell (sh
) is a shell command-line interpreter for computer operating systems.
Ultrix is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX, MicroVAX and DECstations.
Coherent is a clone of the Unix operating system for IBM PC compatibles and other microcomputers, developed and sold by the now-defunct Mark Williams Company (MWC). Historically, the operating system was a proprietary product, but it became open source in 2015, released under the BSD-3-Clause license.
Version 7 Unix, also called Seventh Edition 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 Corporation in the early 1980s. V7 was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms.
Multi-Environment Real-Time (MERT), later renamed UNIX Real-Time (UNIX-RT), is a hybrid time-sharing and real-time operating system developed in the 1970s at Bell Labs for use in embedded minicomputers. A version named Duplex Multi Environment Real Time (DMERT) was the operating system for the AT&T 3B20D telephone switching minicomputer, designed for high availability; DMERT was later renamed Unix RTR.
UNIX/32V is an early version of the Unix operating system from Bell Laboratories, released in June 1979. 32V was a direct port of the Seventh Edition Unix to the DEC VAX architecture.
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but also had many problems. Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna – decided to redo the work, but on a much smaller scale.
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).
The Model 7/32 and Model 8/32 were 32-bit minicomputers introduced by Perkin-Elmer after they acquired Interdata, Inc., in 1973. The 7/32 and 8/32 are primarily remembered for being the first 32-bit minicomputers under $10,000. The 8/32 was a more powerful machine than the 7/32, with the notable feature of allowing user-programmable microcode to be employed.
The Portable C Compiler is an early compiler for the C programming language written by Stephen C. Johnson of Bell Labs in the mid-1970s, based in part on ideas proposed by Alan Snyder in 1973, and "distributed as the C compiler by Bell Labs... with the blessing of Dennis Ritchie."
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. Since the original has become obsolete, the term "BSD" is commonly used for its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD.
xv6 is a modern reimplementation of Sixth Edition Unix in ANSI C for multiprocessor x86 and RISC-V systems. It was created for pedagogical purposes in MIT's Operating System Engineering course in 2006.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX).
The history of the Berkeley Software Distribution began in the 1970s when University of California, Berkeley received a copy of Unix. Professors and students at the university began adding software to the operating system and released it as BSD to select universities. Since it contained proprietary Unix code, it originally had to be distributed subject to AT&T licenses. The bundled software from AT&T was then rewritten and released as free software under the BSD license. However, this resulted in a lawsuit with Unix System Laboratories, the AT&T subsidiary responsible for Unix. Eventually, in the 1990s, the final versions of BSD were publicly released without any proprietary licenses, which led to many descendants of the operating system that are still maintained today.
There are even some Version 6 systems still in regular operation.