[1] Developed by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs, it was a replacement for the Thompson shell, whose executable file had the same name—sh.

Although it is used as an interactive command interpreter, it was also intended as a scripting language and contains most of the features that are commonly considered to produce structured programs.

Stephen Bourne's coding style was influenced by his experience with the ALGOL 68C compiler[3] that he had been working on at Cambridge University.

Moreover, – although the v7 shell is written in C – Bourne took advantage of some macros[4] to give the C source code an ALGOL 68 flavor.

These macros (along with the finger command distributed in Unix version 4.2BSD) inspired the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC).

[6] Features of the Bourne shell versions since 1979 include:[7] Duplex Multi-Environment Real-Time (DMERT) is a hybrid time-sharing/real-time operating system developed in the 1970s at Bell Labs Indian Hill location in Naperville, Illinois uses a 1978 snapshot of Bourne Shell "VERSION sys137 DATE 1978 Oct 12 22:39:57".