- Sixth Edition 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 outsideBell Labs . It was released in May1975 . Sincesource code was available and the license was not explicit enough to forbid it, V6 was taken up as a teaching tool, notably by theUniversity of California, Berkeley and theUniversity of New South Wales (UNSW).V6 was notable for "Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition", also known as the "Lions Book" after its author, UNSW professor
John Lions . This book was an edited selection of the main parts of the kernel as implemented for a DigitalPDP-11 /40, and was the main source of kernel documentation for many early Unix developers.The code has been made available under a
BSD License under agreement from theSCO Group ; seeAncient UNIX Systems .Variants
Apart from the first BSD (1BSD), several other Unixes were derived from the V6 code base.
IS/1 was INTERACTIVE's enhanced V6, the first ever commercially sold Unix version.
A port of V6 to the
Interdata 7/32 was completed byRichard Miller andRoss Nealon atWollongong University ,Australia , during1976 -1977 . This project was supervised by professorJuris Reinfelds . The resulting system was called Wollongong Interdata UNIX, Level 6. This distribution also included utilities developed at Wollongong, and later releases had features of V7, notably its Ccompiler . 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.A port of V6 to the
Interdata 8/32 was completed within Bell Labs, but this version was never released.A version of V6 for lower-end PDP-11 systems, such as the 11/10, was available as MINI-UNIX.
PWB/UNIX 1.0 was based on V6 (earlier, internal use-only versions were based on V4 and V5).UNIX/RT was a
real-time operating system , based on V6 and the earlier MERT (Multi-Environment Real-Time Operating System)hypervisor . [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=806519]LSI-UNIX or LSX was a minimal Unix for the LSI-11
microprocessor variant of the PDP-11. It ran in 40kB of memory, with the kernel occupying only 16kB [http://www.mailcom.com/lsx/] .AUSAM (Australian Unix Share Accounting Method), released in November
1979 , was a V6 variant from theUniversity of Sydney , Australia. Its main improvements were better security and process accounting.MNOS was V6-based version of Unix, popular on various Soviet andEastern Bloc PDP-11 clones; over the years it was heavily augmented for partial compatibility withBSD Unix .BKUNIX , based on LSX is the only version of UNIX, working onElektronika BK Soviet personal computer.ee also
*
Version 7 Unix
*Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code
*Ancient UNIX Systems External links
* [http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V6 V6 source code]
* [http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/Interdata_v6 Wollongong Interdata UNIX source code]
* [http://man.unix-history.com/research/v6/ Sixth Edition man pages] in HTML format
* [http://www.ba-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/index.html Unix V6 documents, eg. C Reference, and man pages]
* [http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix98/invited_talks/miller.ps The First Unix Port] ; Richard Miller's account of porting Unix to the Interdata 7/32 (PostScript file)
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