ULTRIX
| Developer | Digital Equipment Corporation |
|---|---|
| Written in | C |
| OS family | Unix |
| Working state | Historic |
| Source model | Closed source |
| Initial release | 1984 |
| Latest release | 4.5 / 1995 |
| Platforms | PDP-11, VAX, MIPS |
| Kernel type | Monolithic kernel |
| Default user interface | Command line interface, DECwindows GUI |
| License | Proprietary |
Ultrix (officially all-caps ULTRIX) is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems. While ultrix is also the Latin word for avenger, the name was chosen solely for its sound.
The initial development of Unix occurred on DEC equipment, notably DEC PDP-7 and PDP-11 (Programmable Data Processor) systems, and the new operating system was sometimes more popular than DEC's own software. Later DEC computers, such as their VAX systems, were also popular platforms on which to run Unix; the first port to VAX, UNIX/32V, was finished in 1978 (the VAX was only released in October 1977). However DEC only supplied its own proprietary operating system, VMS.
DEC's Unix Engineering Group (UEG) was started by Bill Munson with Jerry Brenner and Fred Canter, both from DEC's premier Customer Service Engineering group, Bill Shannon (from Case Western Reserve University), and Armando Stettner (from Bell Labs). Other later members of UEG included Joel Magid, Bill Doll, and Jim Barclay recruited from DEC's various marketing and product management groups.
The UEG team, under Canter's direction, released V7M, a modified version of Unix 7th Edition (q.v.).
Shannon and Stettner worked on low-level CPU and device driver support initially on UNIX/32V but quickly moved to concentrate on working with the University of California, Berkeley's 4BSD. Berkeley's Bill Joy came to New Hampshire to work with Shannon and Stettner to wrap up a new BSD release, incorporating the UEG CPU support and drivers, and to do some last minute development and testing on other configurations available at DEC's facilities. The three brought up a final test version on the main VAX used by the VMS development group. No comments were heard from the VMS developers whose terminals greeted them the next morning with a Unix login prompt. UEG's machine was the first to run the new Unix, labeled 4.5BSD as was the tape Bill Joy took with him. The thinking was that 5BSD would be the next version - university lawyers thought it would be better to call it 4.1BSD. After the completion of 4.1BSD, Bill Joy left Berkeley to work at Sun Microsystems. Shannon later moved from New Hampshire to join him. Stettner stayed at DEC and later conceived of and started the Ultrix project.
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