I never used Unix V7 for real work. My experience with Unix started with 3BSD on a Vax in the early '80s.

I've been playing around with V7 on PDP-11 and Interdata emulators unider Simh and I've got to say, things were much more basic back in those days.

The real visible differences between V7 and SVR2 while relatively small, are still problematic. Just getting basic jobs done is entirely different.

Here's my take:

• To edit files, the best you have is ed(1). I imagine one could get pretty good with ed, but I'm not there. Editing source code or documents is painful and I don't know if I have the patience to get proficient. There is no termcap database or library (these came from Bill Joy in BSD), so building a full screen editor here would be very difficult. In the 1980's we used to say that you had to be familiar with ed, because it was the only editor you could count on in an emergency. Generally vi and ex were kept in /usr/bin, and when things went to hell in a handbasket as they did all too often back then, all you had was / and ed. If you needed to edit some configuration file to get the system up, it really helped to be familiar with ed.
• No more(1) or less(1), or even pg(1) here. I'm guessing that most folks were on hard copy terminals or serial terminals at 300baud so that XON/XOFF was usable. on a modern terminal, they are not. Luckily, we have large histories and scrollable windows now, so there is a workaround.
• A very early (1979) bourne shell, with a number of useful, basic things missing: aliases, shell functions, and a few others. Never mind a lack of job control (SVR3), history, command completion and other things we take for granted today and are a part of everything we do. Most of these are more an irritation, and do not actually stand in the way of getting work done.

On the other hand, the basic things I want to do as a hobbyist on the system are doable:

• C programming, incuding some systems programming
• F77 programming, just for the hell of it
• Text processing with nroff and ms, mostly to document what I discover about V7

So other than those things I mentioned above, V7 "feels" much like later Unixen. If I could just get a better editor running, I would feel much better. In the near future, I will build a basic more(1) command that will help while examining text, but actually getting text into the system would seem to be the big problem. Maybe I'll just try to get better with ed.

I found some graphics showing the history of Unix that might be interesting to some.