1982–1983

AT&T formally released a beta version of UNIX to the commercial sector in 1982. In 1983, AT&T released the first true production version of UNIX, naming it System III. (Systems I and II never existed.) Although it was based on version 7 of UNIX and thus included some BSD utilities, the release of System III did not include the vi editor or the C shell. Instead, AT&T included the programmer’s workbench.

With the release of System III, AT&T saw a future in UNIX and soon released System V. (System IV was never seen outside of AT&T.) System V included an editor, curses (the screen-oriented software libraries), and the init program, which was used to start up processes at UNIX bootup.

In the early 1980s, Joy left Berkeley with a master’s degree in electrical engineering and was recruited by the founders of Sun Microsystems (an acronym for Stanford University Network):Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim , and Scott McNealy. Joy was to be in charge of Sun’s operating system. Sun’s implementation of BSD was called SunOS. Sun extended the networking tools of the operating system to include the network file system (NFS), which was to become an industry standard. Sun also did some of the early work in developing a window environment for UNIX. SunOS was first released in 1983.

With workstation products now offered by Sun, UNIX began to gain acceptance in the high-tech arena, especially in computer-aided design and computer-aided engineering (CAD/CAE) environments. The early 1980s saw CAD/CAE become popular. Additional workstation vendors such as HP and Apollo began to exploit CAD/CAE capabilities and performance gains over the popular personal computers of the time. These UNIX workstations could outperform PCs and, with UNIX as an operating system, could provide a multiuser environment.

In other business computing environments, however, UNIX was still considered a hostile environment and did not pose a threat to the mainframes of the time. UNIX had yet to define itself as a user-friendly, tried-and-tested operating system. However, it was gaining ground in the areas of multitasking and networking. More important, UNIX was being touted as the operating system that provided portability between different hardware architectures, and as a result, software developers were getting excited about UNIX. In theory, a program written in C for UNIX would be portable to any hardware platform running the UNIX operating system.