Interesting. In my head, v7 is kind of the pinnacle of what you should run on a PDP-11 (yes, I know 2.11BSD is still maintained), but that once you add a networking stack, the 16-bit address limitations really start to hurt, no matter how clever you are with your overlays. But when I think of v7, in my mind it's running on an 11/70.

I also find the multilayer switching described in the streams networking implementation a lot like "inetd, all the way down." That's kinda nifty.

Adam

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 10:57 AM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> How long was research running on a PDP-11 and when did they move to a VAX?

London and Reiser had ported Unix to the VAX, replete with virtual memory, in 1978. By the time v7 was released (1979), Vaxen had become the workhorse machines in Research.

Doug