Excellent responses here. Brings back so many great memories.

My 1 cent would be to ask the question:

   Which of today's Unix variants (Linux, BSD, AIX, Cygwin, ...) is

   closest to the philosophy of the Ken-Denis-Doug versions of V6 Unix?

All the variants I see today suffer from "complexification" - a John Mashey term.

Documentation of commands today has grown 5 to 10 fold for each

command in /usr/bin. V7 had less than 64 well documented

system calls. Today's Linux, AIX, and others have how many?

I don't know.

The concept of producing a stream of text as the output of a program

that does simple jobs well has been replaced by "power-shell" thinking

of passing binary objects rather than text between program - a decidedly

non-portable idea.

Passing "objects" requires attaching to a dynamically linked

library (that will change or even disappear

with the next release of the OS or the object library).

With Research Unix, I could pipe the output of a Unix program

running on an Intel 486 to another program running on a Motorola

68000 or a Zilog Z80000 or an IBM AIX machine.

IPhones, iPads, and my Android tablet don't have a usable text editor. All

non-Unix text editors seem to struggle to offer a fixed width font. (Ever

try to make columns line up on an iPhone or Android tablet?) Complexification

rears its ugly head.

I still use vi on both my Mac and PC (Cygwin). (I can't find a usable gvim

for Mac and Macvim is weird but doesn't seem to know what a mouse is.)

Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix,

anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park.  Today, everything

is GUI and nothing can
be automated easily or, most of the time, not at all.

Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and complexity.

It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most.

(Don't mind me, I'm just outgassing for no good reason.)

Ed

On Thu, Jun 6, 2024 at 3:06 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:

Ralph Corderoy wrote in
<20240606095502.AD4EE210F4@orac.inputplus.co.uk>:
|There's a chart of the connections between Unix versions at
|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_systems, though I dislike the
|lack of direction given there are some arcs with little incline.
|It says it's based on https://www.levenez.com/unix/ where Éric notes his
|chart is not limited to just source-code transfer.

I also admire that FreeBSD and NetBSD keep on maintaining the
bsd-family-tree (and in the original form, not that dots thing, or
how it was called). So that starts with

First Edition (V1)
|
Second Edition (V2)
|
Third Edition (V3)
|
Fourth Edition (V4)
|
Fifth Edition (V5)
|
Sixth Edition (V6) -----*
\ |
\ |
\ |
Seventh Edition (V7)----|----------------------*
\ | |
\ 1BSD |
32V | |
\ 2BSD---------------* |
\ / | |
\ / | |
\/ | |
3BSD | |
| | |
4.0BSD 2.79BSD |
| | |
4.1BSD --------------> 2.8BSD <-*
| |
4.1aBSD -----------\ |
| \ |
4.1bBSD \ |
| \ |
*------ 4.1cBSD --------------> 2.9BSD
/ | |
Eighth Edition | 2.9BSD-Seismo
| | |
+----<--- 4.2BSD 2.9.1BSD
...

and says

Multics 1965
UNIX Summer 1969
DEC PDP-7
First Edition 1971-11-03 [QCU]
DEC PDP-11/20, Assembler
Second Edition 1972-06-12 [QCU]
10 UNIX installations
Third Edition 1973-02-xx [QCU]
Pipes, 16 installations
Fourth Edition 1973-11-xx [QCU]
rewriting in C effected,
above 30 installations
Fifth Edition 1974-06-xx [QCU]
above 50 installations
Sixth Edition 1975-05-xx [QCU]
port to DEC Vax
Seventh Edition 1979-01-xx [QCU] 1979-01-10 [TUHS]
first portable UNIX
..

with a nice Bibliography with falsely underscored headline plus

URL: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/share/misc/bsd-family-tree

It also covers the system most of you are using (later).

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)