UNIX System III
Discontinued UNIX variant
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, 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, 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.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “UNIX System III”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- SysIII-boot.png by Missileboi, CC BY-SA 4.0
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