1.
Unix
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Among these is Apples macOS, which is the Unix version with the largest installed base as of 2014. Many Unix-like operating systems have arisen over the years, of which Linux is the most popular, Unix was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmer users. The system grew larger as the system started spreading in academic circles, as users added their own tools to the system. Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration and these concepts are collectively known as the Unix philosophy. By the early 1980s users began seeing Unix as a universal operating system. Under Unix, the system consists of many utilities along with the master control program. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the division between user space and kernel space, the microkernel concept was introduced in an effort to reverse the trend towards larger kernels and return to a system in which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities. In an era when a standard computer consisted of a disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output. However, modern systems include networking and other new devices, as graphical user interfaces developed, the file model proved inadequate to the task of handling asynchronous events such as those generated by a mouse. In the 1980s, non-blocking I/O and the set of inter-process communication mechanisms were augmented with Unix domain sockets, shared memory, message queues, and semaphores. In microkernel implementations, functions such as network protocols could be moved out of the kernel, Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not by the aims and their last researchers to leave Multics, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna, decided to redo the work on a much smaller scale. The name Unics, a pun on Multics, was suggested for the project in 1970. Peter H. Salus credits Peter Neumann with the pun, while Brian Kernighan claims the coining for himself, in 1972, Unix was rewritten in the C programming language. Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are referred to as Research Unix. In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to faculty at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science, UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson was instrumental in negotiating the terms of this license. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to adoption of Unix by commercial startups, including Sequent, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4, in the 1990s, Unix-like systems grew in popularity as Linux and BSD distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers
2.
PDP-11
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The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 had several innovative features, and was easier to program than its predecessors through the additional general-purpose registers. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold and its successor in the mid-range minicomputer niche was the 32-bit VAX-11, named as a nod to the PDP-11s popularity. The PDP-11 is considered by experts to be the most popular minicomputer ever. Design features of the PDP-11 influenced the design of most late-1970s computer systems including the Intel x86, design features of PDP-11 operating systems, as well as other operating systems from Digital Equipment, influenced the design of other operating systems such as CP/M and hence also MS-DOS. For a decade, the PDP-11 was the smallest system that could run Unix and it is commonly stated that the C programming language took advantage of several low-level PDP-11–dependent programming features, albeit not originally by design. In 1967–68, DEC engineers designed a 16-bit, word-addressed machine, management cancelled the project and some of the engineers later left DEC and produced it as the Data General Nova. A subsequent effort, code-named Desk Calculator, looked at a variety of options before choosing what became the 16-bit PDP-11, DECs previous PDP-8 and PDP-9 had 12- and 18-bit words, the PDP-11 family was announced in January 1970 and shipments began early that year. DEC sold over 170,000 PDP-11s in the 1970s, initially manufactured of small-scale transistor–transistor logic, a single-board large scale integration version of the processor was developed in 1975. A two-or-three-chip processor, the J-11 was developed in 1979, the last models of the PDP-11 line were the PDP-11/94 and -11/93 introduced in 1990. The PDP-11 processor architecture has an orthogonal instruction set. For example, instead of such as load and store. More complex instructions such as add likewise can have memory, register, input, most operands can apply any of eight addressing modes to eight registers. The addressing modes provide register, immediate, absolute, relative, deferred, and indexed addressing, use of relative addressing lets a machine-language program be position-independent. Early models of the PDP-11 had no dedicated bus for input/output, an input/output device determined the memory addresses to which it would respond, and specified its own interrupt vector and interrupt priority. DEC openly published the basic Unibus specifications, even offering prototyping bus interface circuit boards, the Unibus made the PDP-11 suitable for custom peripherals. Higher-performance members of the PDP-11 family, starting with the PDP-11/45 Unibus and 11/83 Q-bus systems, instead, memory was interfaced by dedicated circuitry and space in the CPU cabinet, while the Unibus continued to be used for I/O only
3.
SIMH
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SIMH is a highly portable, multi-system emulator which runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and OpenVMS. It is maintained by Bob Supnik, a former DEC engineer and DEC vice president, SIMH was based on a much older systems emulator called MIMIC, which was written in the late 1960s at Applied Data Research. SIMH was started in 1993 with the purpose of preserving minicomputer hardware and software which was fading into obscurity, SIMH emulates hardware from the following companies. Using SIMH to explore UNIX history - Matthew Hoskins
4.
Bell Labs
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Nokia Bell Labs is an American research and scientific development company, owned by Finnish company Nokia. Its headquarters are located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in addition to laboratories around the rest of the United States. The historic laboratory originated in the late 19th century as the Volta Laboratory, Bell Labs was also at one time a division of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories, in 1880, the French government awarded Alexander Graham Bell the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs, approximately US$10,000 at that time for the invention of the telephone. Bell used the award to fund the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C. in collaboration with Sumner Tainter, the laboratory is also variously known as the Volta Bureau, the Bell Carriage House, the Bell Laboratory and the Volta Laboratory. The laboratory focused on the analysis, recording, and transmission of sound, Bell used his considerable profits from the laboratory for further research and education to permit the diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf. This resulted in the founding of the Volta Bureau c,1887, located at Bells fathers house at 1527 35th Street in Washington, D. C. where its carriage house became their headquarters in 1889. In 1893, Bell constructed a new building, close by at 1537 35th St. specifically to house the lab, the building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1972. In 1884, the American Bell Telephone Company created the Mechanical Department from the Electrical, the first president of research was Frank B. Jewett, who stayed there until 1940, ownership of Bell Laboratories was evenly split between AT&T and the Western Electric Company. Its principal work was to plan, design, and support the equipment that Western Electric built for Bell System operating companies and this included everything from telephones, telephone exchange switches, and transmission equipment. Bell Labs also carried out consulting work for the Bell Telephone Company, a few workers were assigned to basic research, and this attracted much attention, especially since they produced several Nobel Prize winners. Until the 1940s, the principal locations were in and around the Bell Labs Building in New York City. Of these, Murray Hill and Crawford Hill remain in existence, the largest grouping of people in the company was in Illinois, at Naperville-Lisle, in the Chicago area, which had the largest concentration of employees prior to 2001. Since 2001, many of the locations have been scaled down or closed. The Holmdel site, a 1.9 million square foot structure set on 473 acres, was closed in 2007, the mirrored-glass building was designed by Eero Saarinen. In August 2013, Somerset Development bought the building, intending to redevelop it into a commercial and residential project. The prospects of success are clouded by the difficulty of readapting Saarinens design and by the current glut of aging, eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories
5.
Research Unix
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The term Research Unix first appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal to distinguish it from other versions internal to Bell Labs whose code-base had diverged from the primary CSRC version. However, that term was little-used until Version 8 Unix, but has been applied to earlier versions as well. Prior to V8, the system was most commonly called simply UNIX or the UNIX Time-Sharing System. AT&T licensed Version 5 to educational institutions, and Version 6 also to commercial sites, schools paid $200 and others $20,000, discouraging most commercial use, but Version 6 was the most widely used version into the 1980s. So, the first Research Unix would be the First Edition, another common way of referring to them is Version x Unix, where x is the manual edition. All modern editions of Unix—excepting Unix-like implementations such as Coherent, Minix, starting with the 8th Edition, versions of Research Unix had a close relationship to BSD. This began by using 4. 1cBSD as the basis for the 8th Edition. 1c and this continued with 9th and 10th. The ordinary user command-set was, I guess, a bit more BSD-flavored than SysVish, Version 3, Version 4 and Version 5 should not be confused with the UNIX3.0, UNIX4.0 and UNIX5.0 releases by the AT&T UNIX Support Group. After Version 10, Unix development at Bell Labs was stopped in favor of a system, Plan 9 from Bell Labs. In 2002, Caldera International released V7 Unix as FOSS under a permissive BSD-like software license, in 2017, Unix Heritage Society and Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. List of new features in Research Unix 9th Edition
6.
Version 7 Unix
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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 Corporation in the early 1980s, V7 was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporations PDP-11 minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms. Unix versions from Bell Labs were designated by the edition of the manual with which they were accompanied. Released in 1979, the Seventh Edition was preceded by Sixth Edition, V7 was the first readily portable version of Unix. The first Sun workstations ran a V7 port by UniSoft, the first version of Xenix for the Intel 8086 was derived from V7, the VAX port of V7, called UNIX/32V, was the direct ancestor of the popular 4BSD family of Unix systems. The group at University of Wollongong that had ported V6 to the Interdata 7/32 ported V7 to that machine as well, Interdata sold the port as Edition VII, making it the first commercial UNIX offering. DEC distributed their own PDP-11 version of V7, called V7M, UEG evolved into the group that later developed Ultrix. At the time of its release, though, its greatly extended feature set came at the expense of a decrease in performance compared to V6, the exact number of system calls varies depending on the operating system version. More recent systems have seen growth in the number of supported system calls. Linux 3.2.0 has 380 system calls and FreeBSD8.0 has over 450, in 2002, Caldera International released V7 as FOSS under a permissive BSD-like software license. Bootable images for V7 can still be downloaded today, and can be run on modern hosts using PDP-11 emulators such as SIMH, an x86 port has been developed by Nordier & Associates. Paul Allen maintains several publicly accessible computer systems, including a PDP-11/70 running Unix Version 7. Request a login from Living Computers, Museum + Labs and try running Version 7 Unix on the original equipment, many new features were introduced in Version 7. Programming tools, lex, lint, and make, the Portable C Compiler was provided along with the earlier, PDP-11-specific, C compiler by Ritchie. These first appeared in the Research Unix lineage in Version 7, mpx files were considered experimental, not enabled in the default kernel, and disappeared from later versions, which offered sockets or CB UNIXs IPC facilities instead. Version 6 Unix Seventh Edition Unix terminal interface Ancient UNIX Unix Seventh Edition manual Browsable source code PDP Unix Preservation Society
7.
CB UNIX
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Columbus UNIX, or CB UNIX, is a discontinued a variant of the UNIX operating system used internally at Bell Labs for administrative databases and transaction processing. It was developed at the Columbus, Ohio branch, based on V6, V7 and it was little-known outside the company. CB UNIX was developed to address deficiencies inherent in Research Unix, notably the lack of communication and file locking. Several Bell System operation support system products were based on CB UNIX such as Switching Control Center System, the primary innovations were power-fail restart, line disciplines, terminal types, and IPC features. The interprocess communication features developed for CB UNIX were message queues, semaphores and these eventually appeared in mainstream Unix systems starting with System V in 1983, and are now collectively known as System V IPC
