Software:UNIX System III

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Short description: Discontinued UNIX variant
UNIX System III
Refer to caption
UNIX System III on SIMH (PDP-11)
DeveloperAT&T's Unix Support Group (USG)
Written inC
OS familyUnix
Working stateDiscontinued
Source modelClosed source
Initial release1982; 42 years ago (1982)[1]
Available inEnglish
PlatformsDEC PDP-11 and VAX
Default user interfaceCommand-line interface
Succeeded byUNIX System V

UNIX System III (or System 3) is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system released by AT&T's Unix Support Group (USG).

AT&T announced System III in late 1981,[2] and it was first released outside of Bell Labs in 1982. UNIX System III was a mix of various AT&T Unix systems: Version 7 Unix, PWB/UNIX 2.0, CB UNIX 3.0, UNIX/RT and UNIX/32V. System III supported the DEC PDP-11 and VAX computers.

The system was apparently called System III because it was considered the outside release of UNIX/TS 3.0.1 and CB UNIX 3 which were internally supported Bell Labs Unices; its manual refers to it as UNIX Release 3.0 and there were no Unix versions called System I or System II. There was no official release of UNIX/TS 4.0 (which would have been System IV) either,[3][4] so System III was succeeded by System V, based on UNIX/TS 5.0.

System III introduced new features such as named pipes, the uname system call and command, and the run queue. It also combined various improvements to Version 7 Unix by outside organizations. However, it did not include notable additions made in BSD such as the C shell (csh) and screen editing.

Third-party variants of System III include (early versions of) HP-UX, IRIX, IS/3 and PC/IX, PC-UX, PNX, SINIX, Venix and Xenix.

References

  1. "The Single UNIX® Specification History & Timeline". 2004. https://unix.org/Posters/download/unix_posterA3_Screen.pdf. 
  2. Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE 8 (10): 132. https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-10/1983_10_BYTE_08-10_UNIX#page/n133/mode/2up. Retrieved 30 January 2015. 
  3. Dale Dejager (1984-01-16). "UNIX History". Newsgroupnet.unix.
  4. Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (2001). Modern Operating Systems (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 675. ISBN 0-13-031358-0. https://archive.org/details/modernoperatings00tane/page/675. "Whatever happened to System IV is one of the great unsolved mysteries of computer science." 

External links