UNIX System III

Discontinued UNIX variant

Not to be confused with Version 3 Unix.

Operating system

UNIX System III

UNIX System III on SIMH (PDP-11)

Developer| AT&T's Unix Support Group (USG)
Written in| C
OS family| Unix
Working state| Discontinued
Source model| Closed source
Initial release| 1980; 45 years ago (1980)[1]
Available in| English
Platforms| DEC PDP-11 and VAX
Default
user interface| Command-line interface
Succeeded by| UNIX 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

[edit]

1. ^ Dolotta, T. A.; Olsson, S. B.; Petruccelli, A. G., eds. (June 1980). UNIX User's Manual, Release 3.0. Murray Hill, NJ 07974: Laboratory 364, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated.`{{cite book}}`: CS1 maint: location (link)
2. ^ Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. Vol. 8, no. 10\. p. 132. Retrieved January 30, 2015.
3. ^ Dale Dejager (January 16, 1984). "UNIX History". Newsgroup: net.unix.
4. ^ Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (2001). Modern Operating Systems (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 675. ISBN 0-13-031358-0. "Whatever happened to System IV is one of the great unsolved mysteries of computer science."

## External links

[edit]

* Salus, Peter H. (April 2000). "20 Years Ago in UNIX". LOGIN. Vol. 25, no. 2\. pp. 72–73.
* System III source code
* "UNIX System III on PDP-11". Archived from the original on April 11, 2019.
* "UNIX System III on VAX". Archived from the original on April 11, 2019.

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