<story><title>Why V7 Unix matters so much</title><url>https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/V7WhyItMattersSoMuch</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ggm</author><text>I was shown it in 79. I didn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;get it&amp;quot; I wound up using it in 81&amp;#x2F;82 and got it immediately. Between the gap period I&amp;#x27;d moved from having the thinnest understanding of what programming was, to completing a CS degree and working in systems management and networking. Once you have had to use a pre-UNIX JCL such as a TOPS-10 system, moving to a unix system was a clear step up. The Dec 10 was a fine machine. It was just harder to sequence discrete units of code into an outcome. The pipe, and a reasonably programmatic shell and related tools were the killer app moment.&lt;p&gt;VMS was good, but it was still sys$system:[thing]&amp;#x2F;path arcane. And had complex database-like file abstractions which I am sure were a godsend to people in that space but IPC (using an abstraction called &amp;quot;mailboxes&amp;quot;) was a nightmare. VMS had file versioning, something I think UNIX missed on. ZFS snapshots do much the same at a whole of FS level. UNIX still won, because it was more logically consistent, and had pipes. BSD4.2 brought sockets which I still hate, but they worked inside the consistency model.&lt;p&gt;v7 is where I learned to type. BSD4.1 is where I learned to develop. I still have a fond memory for the v7 pdp11.&lt;p&gt;unix 32V had deep roots in v7, as did the York unix port of v7 to the Vax with VM extensions. I think by then, BSD made it clear where things were going. System III -&amp;gt; System V were really aberrant, streams aside.&lt;p&gt;If Linux hadn&amp;#x27;t emerged, I think the BSD fracture would have led naturally to something dominant in FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD. But, they lost impetus to mind-share in the world of personal computers.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why V7 Unix matters so much</title><url>https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/V7WhyItMattersSoMuch</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eminence32</author><text>V7 was released in 1979.  If you click on the first link in the article, you get to the wikipedia page on V7, and from there you have a screenshot[1] of what running `ls -l &amp;#x2F;usr` looked like in a terminal&lt;p&gt;Two things stand out to me about this screenshot:&lt;p&gt;1. The output of `ls -l` is very very similar to what my 2021 debian+coreutils produces.&lt;p&gt;2. The contents of `&amp;#x2F;usr` are not all that different either!  Directories that are common to my system and this screenshot are:  games, include, lib, src.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Version_7_Unix#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Version_7_Unix_SIMH_PDP11_Emulation_DMR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Version_7_Unix#&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;File:Ver...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>