8th edition Unix(tm)

[Henry Spencer]

As I've heard it, the story on the "8th edition" is as follows.

The kernel is roughly 4.1BSD plus Dennis Ritchie's line disciplines.
The user-level stuff is extensively worked-over, with a lot of Berkeley
garbage ripped out and a lot of new stuff added.  There are undoubtedly
a good many other miscellaneous things like Blit support, networking
software, and so forth.

The 8th edition basically runs on the machines at the Research lab
(the home of Unix) and nowhere else.

The official word is (or at least, has been in the past) that the 8th
edition will *never* be distributed.  The folks at Research apparently
went through immense effort and pain getting V7 out the door, and swore
off software distribution forever as a result.  It also seems safe to
assume that the 8th edition doesn't fit well with AT&T's current view
that System V is the be-all and end-all of Unixes and will be the base
for all future work.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry