Questions tagged [historical-unix]
The historical Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s, as opposed to Unix variants and clones from other vendors. This tag is only about the historical product known as UNIX Time-Sharing System or UNIX System III/IV/V. For the history of the Unix family of operating systems in general, use the "history" tag.
53 questions
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Historical Unix CPU time billing
How did old Unix systems bill users? I read about some old CS courses where you could waste your budget with infinite loops.
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How to flash AT&T UNIX to cd, floppy or (preferably) USB?
Preferably USB as it would be easier to carry arround and install on other systems
I have never used Unix.
My first PC was a windows XP laptop when I was about 8 years old. i have installed Linux, DOS,...
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UNIX SVR4.2 > How do I find the IP address on a Virtualbox system?
I have installed a VirtualBox VM of UNIX System V Release 4.2 and have discovered just how barren the internet is on documentation of it. Only a few modern commands exist, although obviously because ...
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How was a shell like when operating systems didn't had a GUI? [closed]
I understand the concepts of terminal, console, shell and their differences. I know a shell today is an interpreter that communicates with the OS kernel to perform some actions and does it through ...
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Unix System III Installation
I recently became curious about history of modern operating systems. Since the best way to learn is to see yourself - I would like to ask:
Is there a way to download and install Unix System III on a ...
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Is there an example for a shell or computing accessibility culture aspiring a shell with more special characters and if so what is it? [closed]
I was always a bit frustrated from the lack of characters in modern computer systems such as, from what I know:
A global template literal character for which the closest character today is a backtick ...
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Were there any programs besides editors that relied on on the O_NDELAY file status flag (predecessor to O_NONBLOCK)
Recently, I've been researching on the O_NONBLOCK feature specified in the standard.
From what I've seen so far, the predecessor of this flag - O_NDELAY had existed all the way back to UNIX System III....
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How to add user in Unix System 7?
I have created a Unix System 7 VM in VirtualBox following instructions by Robert Nordier. I have dropped to the single user prompt (#). I can run commands like ls and passwd and cat. However, useradd ...
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I thought Linux is POSIX-compliant, yet some POSIX commands are not found [closed]
I wanted to write a small shell script for Linux and other UNIX systems (probably OSX). And also, why not keep things platform-independent out of principle, right?
So I went with a #!/bin/sh shebang ...
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Does UNOS still exist?
UNOS is a derivative of UNIX by Charles River Information Systems.
Google and Wikipedia doesn't have much information on it.
Is there any version of it still in use?
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Who owns the UNIX trademark?
I am currently enrolled in a course that is teaching me UNIX fundamentals, such as common commands and such. After doing some digging on UNIX, I came across the rabbit hole of legal battles over who ...
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Why does ed start at the last line?
Why does ed start at the last instead of first line of a file?
Most of ed's behavior makes sense when you remember that it was for interacting with a printer, but not this. Since I believe it reads ...
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why are the definition of true and false in stdbool.h the exact opposite from the UNIX programs true and false?
stdbool.h is usually defined as:
#define false 0
#define true 1
(Sources: OpenBSD, musl, etc.)
whereas the unix program false - which just has a unsuccessful status code, is defined as:
int
main(...
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What format does syslog() use when writing to /dev/log?
I initially thought to post this to StackOverflow because my interest was primarily from a programming focus, but after reading about the history tag (and the question it linked to), I posted it to ...
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How can I try old UNIX versions? [duplicate]
I want to try old versions of UNIX for fun, but I don't know where to get them. Is there a way to download them?
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