UNIX History

[usenet]

The story goes that the stuff new to 5.0 (called System V when it
was released to the outside world) was put there to satisfy
the needs of the people at Columbus, who were using UNIX as a base for
writing 'Operations Support Systems', ie. programs to be used by
operating companys in non-programmer environments.  They needed things
like shared memory and inter-process communication.  Those features
had already been done for CB-UNIX (Whether as part of DMERT or UNIX, I
dont know.) but were re-done but the UNIX Support Group people.
The hope was that the Columbus people would all convert over to 5.0
and efforts could be consolidated.  I dont know whether this hope was
realized, I left the Labs about the time this was happening.
 Rick Thomas