SysV IPC: eyesore or misunderstood art?

[Bob Devine]

  The story I heard is that System V IPC comes from a version
that the folks at AT&T/Columbus put together for operations support.
Even before System III, they had a special version of Unix that
had an implementation of messages, shared memory and semaphores. 
A more general IPC was added to System V for them just so there
wouldn't be a need to have two Unixes supported.

Bob Devine