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, amongst others, on Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 minicomputers and on the Interdata 8/32. Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... This page refers to the year 1979. ... Bell Telephone Laboratories or Bell Labs was originally the research and development arm of the United States Bell System, and was the premier corporate facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies from telephone switches to specialized coverings for telephone cables, to the transistor. ... AT&T Inc. ... The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive, informally sometimes including the years 1979, 1990 and 1991. ... Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. ... The Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 were 32-bit minicomputers developed by Interdata in the 1970s. ...

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. Sixth Edition Unix (also known as V6 Unix) was the first version of Unix to see wide release outside Bell Labs. ... Research Unix is a term commonly used to refer to versions of the Unix operating system for DEC PDP-7, PDP-9 PDP-11 and VAX and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, developed in the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center. ... 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. ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley starting in the 1970s. ...

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. In computer science, porting is the adaptation of a piece of software so that it will function in a different computing environment to that for which it was originally written. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... Xenix was a version of the Unix operating system, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T in the 1980s. ... This article is about the computing term VAX, not to be confused with the vacuum cleaner/floorcare manufacturer Vax. ... UNIX/32V was an early version of the Unix operating system from Bell Laboratories, released late in 1978. ... The University of Wollongong is a medium sized University accommodating 15,000 to 20,000 students in the Wollongong area of Australia. ... The Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 were 32-bit minicomputers developed by Interdata in the 1970s. ...

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. Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... Ultrix was the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporations (DEC) native Unix systems. ...

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 the last "true" Unix, an improvement over all preceding and following Unices [1].

Released as Free Software

In 2002, Caldera Systems released V7 under a free software license. For album titles with the same name, see 2002 (album). ... The SCO Group, Inc. ... The GNU free software logo Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. ...

Boot images for V7 can still be downloaded today, to be run on PCs using PDP-11 emulators.

See also

• Version 6 Unix
• Ancient UNIX

Sixth Edition Unix (also known as V6 Unix) was the first version of Unix to see wide release outside Bell Labs. ... Ancient UNIX is a term coined by Santa Cruz Operation (now Tarantella, Inc. ...

External links

• Unix Seventh Edition Manual (Bell Labs)
• Browsable source code
• PDP Unix Preservation Society