PWB/UNIX

PWB/UNIX (for Programmer's Workbench) was an early version of the Unix operating system.

Prior to 1976 Unix development at AT&T was done by a small group of researchers in the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Group (Department 1127). But as word of the usefulness of Unix spread throughout the company the decision was made to develop a version of Unix tailored to support programmers doing production work, not research. The Programmer's Workbench was started in 1973 by Evan Ivie and Rudd Canaday to support a computer center for a 1000-employee Bell Labs division, which would be the largest Unix site for several years to come. PWB/UNIX was to provide tools for teams of programmers to manage their source code and collaborate on projects with other team members.

While the PWB group managed their source on Unix systems, programs were often written to run on other legacy operating systems. For this reason, PWB included software for submitting jobs to IBM System/370, UNIVAC 1100-series, and XDS Sigma 5 computers. In 1978 it was documented that PWB supported a user community of about 1,100 users in the Business Information Systems Programs (BISP) group in Bell Labs.

There were two major releases of Programmer's Workbench. PWB/UNIX 1.0, released July 1, 1977 was based on Version 6 Unix; PWB 2.0 was based on Version 7 Unix. Most of PWB/UNIX was later incorporated in the commercial UNIX System III and UNIX System V releases.

Features

Notable "firsts" in PWB include:

• The Source Code Control System, the first revision control system, written by Marc J. Rochkind
• The Remote job entry batch-submission system
• The PWB shell, written by John R. Mashey, which preceded Steve Bourne's Bourne shell
• The restricted shell (rsh), an option on the PWB shell
• The troff -mm (memorandum) macro package, written by John R. Mashey and Dale W. Smith
• Utilities like find, cpio, expr, all three written by Dick Haight, xargs, egrep and fgrep
• yacc and lex, which, though not written specifically for PWB, were available outside of Bell Labs for the first time in the PWB distribution

External links

• An Introduction to the Programmer's Workbench, 1976 article about PWB
• The Programmer's Workbench -- A Machine for Software Development October 1977 CACM article about PWB (PDF file)
• Unix ad mentioning PWB, from a 1981 issue of Datamation (on Dennis Ritchie's homepage)
• PWB distributions, from the Ancient UNIX Archive