Editing Ultrix

{{Short description|Series of discontinued Unix operating systems by DEC}}
{{Infobox OS
| name = ULTRIX
| logo = 
| screenshot = Ultrix-RISC-4.5.png
| size = 100px
| caption = RISC/ULTRIX 4.5, running [[Motif Window Manager]]
| developer = [[Digital Equipment Corporation]]
| source_model = [[Closed source]]
| kernel_type = [[Monolithic kernel]]
| supported_platforms = [[PDP-11]], [[VAX]], [[MIPS architecture|MIPS]]
| ui = [[Command-line interface]], [[DECwindows]] [[graphical user interface|GUI]]
| programmed_in = [[C (programming language)|C]]
| family = [[Unix]] ([[4.2BSD]])
| released = {{Start date and age|1984}}
| latest_release_version = 4.5
| latest_release_date = {{Start date and age|1995}}
| marketing_target = 
| language = 
| updatemodel = 
| package_manager = 
| working_state = Historic
| license = [[Proprietary software|Proprietary]]
| preceded by = [[Version 7 Unix#Overview|UNIX/V7M]]
| succeeded by = [[OSF/1]]
| website = 
}}
'''Ultrix'''<ref name=UltrixSNA.NYT88>{{cite news  |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]
   |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/24/business/company-news-networking-products-introduced-by-digital.html
   |title=Networking Products Introduced by Digital
   |date=August 24, 1988}}</ref> (officially all-caps '''ULTRIX''') is the brand name of [[Digital Equipment Corporation]]'s (DEC) discontinued native [[Unix]] operating systems for the [[PDP-11]], [[VAX]], [[MicroVAX]]<ref>{{cite news  
   |newspaper=[[Computerworld]]
   |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qpTn_XtzdAMC
   |date=October 1, 1984  |page=50  |title=DEC offers Ultrix-32 for Microvax I}}</ref> and [[DECstation]]s.

==History==
The initial development of Unix occurred on DEC equipment, notably DEC [[PDP-7]] and PDP-11 (Programmable Data Processor) systems. Later DEC computers, such as their VAX, also offered Unix.<ref name="fiedler198310">{{cite news | url=https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-10/1983_10_BYTE_08-10_UNIX#page/n133/mode/2up | title=The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace | work=BYTE | date=October 1983 | access-date=30 January 2015 | author=Fiedler, Ryan | pages=132}}</ref> The first port to VAX, [[UNIX/32V]], was finished in 1978, not long after the October 1977 announcement of the VAX, for which – at that time – DEC only supplied its own proprietary operating system, [[OpenVMS|VMS]].

DEC's Unix Engineering Group (UEG) was started by Bill Munson with Jerry Brenner and Fred Canter, both from DEC's 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 marketing and product management groups.

Under Canter's direction, UEG released '''V7M''', a modified version of [[Version 7 Unix|Unix 7th Edition]] (q.v.).

In 1988 ''The New York Times'' reported that Ultrix was [[POSIX]] compliant.<ref name=UltrixSNA.NYT88/>

===BSD===
Shannon and Stettner worked on low-level [[central processing unit|CPU]] and device driver support initially on UNIX/32V but quickly moved to concentrate on working with the [[University of California, Berkeley]]'s [[Berkeley Software Distribution|4BSD]].  Berkeley's [[Bill Joy]] came to New Hampshire to work with Shannon and Stettner to wrap up a new BSD release.{{citation needed|date=October 2022|reason=The previous citation seemed to involve a book discussing this very text in the context of Wikipedia editing practices, not an actual source for the information itself!}} 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.

Shortly after [[IBM]] announced plans for a native UNIX product, Stettner and Bill Doll presented plans for DEC to make a native VAX Unix product available to its customers; DEC founder [[Ken Olsen]] agreed.

===V7m===
DEC's first native UNIX product was V7M (for modified) or V7M11 for the PDP-11 and was based on [[Version 7 Unix]] from Bell Labs.  V7M was developed by DEC's original Unix Engineering Group (UEG); work was done primarily by Fred Canter and Jerry Brenner, with their teammates Stettner, Bill Burns, Mary Anne Cacciola, and Bill Munson. V7M contained many fixes to the kernel including support for separate instruction and data spaces,<ref>{{cite web|last=Canter|first=Fred|title=V7M 2.1 SPD|url=http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/ultrix-11/Unix_V7M_Release_2.1_Software_Description_Sep81.pdf|publisher=Digital Equipment Corp|access-date=7 January 2012}}</ref> significant work for hardware error recovery, and many device drivers. Much work was put into producing a release that would reliably bootstrap from many tape drives or disk drives. V7M was well respected in the Unix community. UEG evolved into the group that later developed Ultrix.

===First release of Ultrix===
The first native VAX UNIX product from DEC was Ultrix-32, based on 4.2BSD with some non-kernel features from [[UNIX System V|System V]], and was released in June 1984. Ultrix-32 was primarily the brainchild of Armando Stettner.  It provided a Berkeley-based native VAX Unix on a broad array of hardware configurations without the need to access kernel sources. A further goal was to enable better support by DEC's field software and systems support engineers through better hardware support, system messages, and documentation.  It also incorporated several modifications and scripts from Usenet/UUCP experience.  Later, Ultrix-32 incorporated support for [[DECnet]]<ref name=DECnet.NYT>{{cite news  |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]
   |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/22/business/company-news-ashton-digital-software-pact.html
   |title=Ashton-Digital Software Pact  |date=October 22, 1988}}</ref> and other proprietary DEC protocols such as [[Local Area Transport|LAT]]. It did not support [[VMScluster|VAXclustering]].  Given [[Western Electric]]/AT&T Unix licensing, DEC (and others) were restricted to selling binary-only licenses.  A significant part of the engineering work was in making the systems relatively flexible and configurable despite their binary-only nature.

DEC provided Ultrix on three platforms: PDP-11 minicomputers (where Ultrix was one of many available operating systems from DEC), VAX-based computers (where Ultrix was one of two primary OS choices) and the Ultrix-only DECstation workstations and [[DECsystem]] servers. Note that the DECstation and the later DECsystem products (as opposed to DEC's original [[DECSYSTEM-20|DECsystem]] line) used [[MIPS architecture|MIPS]] processors and predate the much later [[DEC Alpha|Alpha]]-based systems.<ref name="electronicnews19890710_dec">{{cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/sim_electronic-news_1989-07-10_35_1766/page/n12/mode/1up | title=Hear DEC to Air VAX Vector Plans | magazine=Electronic News | date=10 July 1989 | access-date=10 August 2022 | last1=Stedman | first1=Craig | pages=13 }}</ref>

===Later releases of Ultrix===
The V7m product was later renamed to ''Ultrix-11''<ref>{{cite web|title=Ultrix-11 2.0 SPD|url=http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/ultrix-11/2.0/AE-X370C-TC_ULTRIX-11_2.0SPD_Sep84.pdf|publisher=Digital Equipment Corp|access-date=7 January 2012}}</ref>  to establish the family with ''Ultrix-32'', but as the PDP-11 faded from view Ultrix-32 became known simply as ''Ultrix''.  When the MIPS versions of Ultrix was released, the VAX and MIPS versions were referred to as VAX/ULTRIX and RISC/ULTRIX respectively.  Much engineering emphasis was placed on supportability and reliable operations including continued work on CPU and device driver support (which was, for the most part, also sent to UC Berkeley), hardware failure support and recovery with enhancement to error message text, documentation, and general work at both the kernel and systems program levels.  Later Ultrix-32 incorporated some features from 4.3BSD and optionally included [[DECnet]] and [[Systems Network Architecture|SNA]]<ref name=UltrixSNA.NYT88/><ref name=NYNEXsystrat.NYT92>{{cite news  
   |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]
   |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/13/business/company-news-764892.html
   |title=Company News |date=May 13, 1992}}</ref> in addition to the standard [[TCP/IP]], and both the [[SMTP]] and DEC's [[Mail-11]] protocols.

Notably, Ultrix implemented the [[inter-process communication]] (IPC) facilities found in System V ([[named pipe]]s, [[Message passing|messages]], [[Semaphore (programming)|semaphores]], and [[shared memory]]).  While the converged Unix from the [[Unix wars|Sun and AT&T alliance]] (that spawned the [[Open Software Foundation]] or OSF), released late 1986, put BSD features into System V, DEC, as described in Stettner's original Ultrix plans, took the best from System V and added it to a BSD base.

Originally, on the VAX workstations, Ultrix-32 had a [[desktop environment]] called UWS, Ultrix Worksystem Software, which was based on [[X Window System|X10]] and the [[Ultrix Window Manager]]. Later, the widespread version 11 of the [[X Window System]] (X11) was added, using a window manager and [[widget toolkit]] named [[DECwindows|XUI]] (X User Interface), which was also used on VMS releases of the time. Eventually Ultrix also provided the [[Motif (software)|Motif]] toolkit and [[Motif Window Manager]].

Ultrix ran on [[multiprocessor]] systems from both the VAX and DECsystem families. Ultrix-32 supported [[SCSI]] disks and tapes<ref>{{cite magazine  |magazine=[[InfoWorld]]
   |date=February 16, 1987  |page=21
   |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0DAEAAAAMBAJ
   |title=MicroVax 2000}}</ref> and also proprietary [[Digital Storage Systems Interconnect]] and CI peripherals employing DEC's [[Mass Storage Control Protocol]], although lacking the OpenVMS distributed lock manager it did not support concurrent access from multiple Ultrix systems.  DEC also released a combination hardware and software product named Prestoserv which accelerated NFS file serving to allow better performance for diskless workstations to communicate to a file serving Ultrix host. The [[Kernel (operating system)|kernel]] supported [[symmetric multiprocessing]] while not being fully [[Thread (computing)|multithreaded]] based upon pre-Ultrix work by [[Armando Stettner]] and earlier work by [[George H. Goble]] at Purdue University.  As such, there was liberal use of locking and some tasks could only be done by particular CPUs (e.g. the processing of [[interrupt]]s). This was not uncommon in other SMP implementations of that time (e.g. [[SunOS]]). Also, Ultrix was slow to support many then new or emerging Unix system capabilities found on competing Unix systems (e.g. it never supported shared libraries or [[Library (computing)#Dynamic linking|dynamically linked]] executables); and a delay in implementing bind, 4.3BSD system calls and libraries.{{citation needed|date=August 2022}} The absence of memory-mapped file support was regarded as a particular deficiency with Ultrix in comparison to its competitors in the early 1990s.<ref name="unixreview199210_decstation">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/sim_unix-review_1992-10_10_10/page/n53/mode/1up | title=Tested Mettle | magazine=UNIX Review | date=October 1992 | access-date=10 August 2022 | last1=Wilson | first1=David | pages=50, 52, 54, 57–58 }}</ref>{{rp|pages=50|quote=Our overall feeling is that Ultrix is an old operating system. Memory-mapped disk files is an important feature, and Ultrix does not offer it.}}

===Last release===
As part of its commitment to the OSF, Armando Stettner went to DEC's Cambridge Research Labs to work on the port of [[OSF/1]] to DEC's RISC-based [[DECstation]] 3100<ref name=R3100.NYT89>{{cite news  |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]
   |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/09/business/digital-will-introduce-pc-s-and-work-stations.html
   |title=Digital Will Introduce PC's and Work Stations
   |author=John Markoff |date=January 9, 1989}}</ref> workstation. This was released in 1991 with a [[Mach (kernel)|Mach]]-based kernel for the MIPS architecture. A port of Ultrix to [[DEC Alpha|Alpha]] was carried out during the initial development of the Alpha architecture, but was never released as a product.<ref>{{cite journal|url=http://www.dtjcd.vmsresource.org.uk/pdfs/dtj_v04-04_1992.pdf|title=Using Simulation to Develop and Port Software|author1=George A. Darcy III|author2=Ronald F. Brender|author3=Stephen J. Morris|author4=Michael V. Iles|journal=Digital Technical Journal|volume=4|issue=4|year=1992|pages=181–192}}</ref>  Later, DEC replaced Ultrix with OSF/1 on Alpha, ending Unix development on the MIPS and VAX platforms.

The last major release of Ultrix was version 4.5 in 1995, which supported all previously supported DECstations and VAXen. There were some subsequent [[Year 2000 problem|Y2K]] patches.

==Application software==
[[WordMARC]], a scientifically oriented word processor,  was among the application packages available for Ultrix.<ref>{{cite news |newspaper=The New York Times |date=May 29, 1999
|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/29/business/company-news-macneal-schwendler-to-buy-marc-analysis-research.html
|title=Macneal-Schwendler to buy MARC Analysis Research}}</ref>

The following shells were provided with Ultrix:<ref>[http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/vax/ultrix/4.2/UWS_V4.2_SPD.txt ULTRIX Worksystem Software, Version 4.2 Software Product Description]</ref>
* [[C shell]]
* [[BSD Bourne Shell]]
* [[System V Bourne Shell]]
* [[KornShell]]

==See also==
*[[Comparison of BSD operating systems]]
*[[Ultrix Window Manager]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==Further reading==
*Ultrix/UWS Release Notes V4.1, AA-ME85D-TE
*Ultrix-32 Supplementary Documents, AA-MF06A-TE
*The Little Gray Book: An ULTRIX Primer, AA-MG64B-TE
*Guide to Installing Ultrix and UWS, AA-PBL0G-TE

==External links==
*[http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/ultrix/ Ultrix FAQ]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20060111104751/http://osdata.com/oses/ultrix.htm Info on Ultrix from OSdata] (version as of Jan 11 2006)
*[ftp://ifctfvax.harhan.org/pub/UNIX/thirdparty/Ultrix-32/sources/ Ultrix 2.0, 4.2, and 4.3 source code]{{dead link|date=May 2025|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}
*[http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/ultrix-11/2.0/ Ultrix system manuals]
*[http://www.polarhome.com/service/man/?of=Ultrix Ultrix man pages]

{{Digital Equipment Corporation}}
{{Unix-like}}
{{Berkeley Software Distribution}}

[[Category:Berkeley Software Distribution]]
[[Category:DEC operating systems]]
[[Category:Discontinued operating systems]]
[[Category:MIPS operating systems]]