UNIX System V

UNIX System V, commonly abbreviated SysV (and usually pronounced—though rarely written—as "System Five"), is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, termed Releases 1, 2, 3 and 4. System V Release 4, or SVR4, was commercially the most successful version, being the result of an effort, marketed as Unix System Unification, which solicited the collaboration of the major Unix vendors. It was the source of several common commercial Unix features.

While AT&T sold their own hardware that ran System V (see AT&T Computer Systems), most customers ran a version from a reseller, based on AT&T's reference implementation. A standards document called the System V Interface Definition outlined the default features and behavior of implementations. The most widely used versions of System V today are IBM's AIX, based on System V Release 3, and Sun's Solaris and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, both based on System V Release 4.

In the 1980s and early-1990s, System V was considered one of the two major "flavors" of UNIX, the other being Berkeley Unix (BSD). During the period of the Unix wars System V was known for being the primary choice of manufacturers of large multiuser systems, in opposition to BSD's dominance of desktop workstations. However, with standardization efforts such as POSIX and the commercial success of Linux, this generalization is not as accurate as it once was.