Eight Edition Unix, also known as Version 8 Unix or V8, was a version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at Bell Labs. It was "released" in February 1985, ran on VAX hardware, and was a variant of 4.1cBSD with some System V.2 features (notably the shell). V8 was the successor to V7 and the predecessor to V9.

V8 Unix introduced the STREAMS I/O mechanism, the /proc filesystem and several other features later incorporated into System V.

V8 also featured a network file system, which permitted access to other machines' entire filesystem trees. For example, the file /etc/passwd on server foovax would be accessible to client machines as /n/foovax/etc/passwd.

The Unix Programming Environment was prepared on a VAX-11/750 running a preliminary version of V8 Unix.

External links

• A Stream Input-Output System
• The UNIX Eighth Edition Network File System
• Eric Schrock's weblog: A brief history of /proc