Too coarse. There was a huge sea change in 1979 with the release of v7. Before that, Unix was recognizably "Unix" but only barely. Process and kernel managem

Too coarse. There was a huge sea change in 1979 with the release of v7. Before that, Unix was recognizably "Unix" but only barely. Process and kernel management was largely in place, you had a shell (not that shell) to compose commands with pipes (but not with the syntax we know today). The C compiler was cc and worked mostly like it does now. The Standard Editor was ed, recognizable now only because it lent its name to the "stream" variant sed, which was present already. But then v7 shipped, and all of a sudden it was Unix! The bourne shell syntax is almost unchanged today (though the interactive features wouldn't arrive until ksh and bash cloned them from csh), and it was so powerful that "shell scripts" using the same language remain a productive environment in the next century. And if that wasn't enough, you could apply "awk" to problems that fit better into the newly en vogue world of regex processing. You could now build your software with this brilliant new tool called "make" that tracked dependencies automatically. And when it was time to share it, you could make "tape archives" with "tar" in a format that is still in use today. Where v6 is like reading Chaucer (you can tell it's the same language, but only read it with difficulty), v7 is Shakespeare (merely crufty and old). Though, to be fair, the standard editor in v7 was still ed. We had to wait a year or two for the Berkeley kids to save us with ex/vi.