V8

The Eighth Edition of Unix was released by Bell Laboratories in February 1985, six years after Seventh Edition.

After the Seventh Edition, the VAX became the base machine for further Unix development. The initial code base was the 32V port, enhanced with selected elements from 4.1BSD, such as support for virtual memory and later the TCP/IP stack. From there the code further evolved and an Eighth Edition manual was completed by Bell Laboratories in February 1985, six years after 7th Edition. The 8th Edition source code was not as widely distributed as the 6th and 7th Edition sources had been.

Key innovations in the 8th Edition kernel include 'streams' and the 'file system switch', which allowed the "everything is a file" approach to be extended to new areas. Three notable developments built on these were the '/proc' file system and new debugger API, a unified approach to networking over Datakit, TCP/IP and phone lines, and a network file system.

Eighth Edition is also at the root of graphical user interfaces on Unix, being the platform used for the development of the 'Blit' graphical terminal and the 'faces' networked icon database.

Several of the new ideas from Eighth Edition found their way into the 3rd release of System V, although in a much modified form.

The files here come from v8.tar.bz2, donated by Dan Cross.