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The Top UNIX Moments of the Century

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the gearing-up-for-the-next-millenium dept.

jyang writes " Performance Computing has this December article: 'The world might seem to run on UNIX, but it wasn't always so. Readers opine on the best moments of everyone's favorite OS.'" Well, among all those "end of the century" lists, we finally found a worthwhile one. ;-)

1 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Greatest moment? The release of Edition 7. by edhall · · Score: 5

    Research Unix Edition 7 was released in 1978, and included:

    • The Bourne Shell, the first shell that was a programming language in its own right.
    • Environment variables (this was an OS enhancement, not just the shell features supporting it).
    • UUCP--the Unix/Unix Copy Program. This brought networking, email, and (a bit later) news to the masses. This feature literally changed the world.
    • File systems larger than 32MB. Unix was no longer a toy.
    • Lint, along with system sources that actually passed it (no more "register *p" for generic pointers everywhere). C was forever improved by this step, since many people learned to program in it from reading kernel sources (just like Linux programmers do today).
    • 32V, the port to the VAX--this was the ancestor of 3.x and 4.x BSD. (The 2.x BSD's ran on PDP-11's, and for a time were developed in parallel.)
    • And so on...
    This was the version that got Unix started at many Universities. It was also the last version of Research Unix to make it out of Bell Labs into general distribution for research and educational use. One can only wonder what we would have seen had AT&T not decided to squeeze money out of it, locking away further Research Editions.
    -Ed