DEC's Unix Engineering Group (UEG) was started by Bill Munson with Jerry Brenner and Fred Canter, both from DEC's Customer Service Engineering group, Bill Shannon (from Case Western Reserve University), and Armando Stettner (from Bell Labs).

Other later members of UEG included Joel Magid, Bill Doll, and Jim Barclay recruited from DEC's marketing and product management groups.

Shortly after IBM announced plans for a native UNIX product, Stettner and Bill Doll presented plans for DEC to make a native VAX Unix product available to its customers; DEC founder Ken Olsen agreed.

V7M contained many fixes to the kernel including support for separate instruction and data spaces,[4] significant work for hardware error recovery, and many device drivers.

The first native VAX UNIX product from DEC was Ultrix-32, based on 4.2BSD with some non-kernel features from System V, and was released in June 1984.

It provided a Berkeley-based native VAX Unix on a broad array of hardware configurations without the need to access kernel sources.

Later Ultrix-32 incorporated some features from 4.3BSD and optionally included DECnet and SNA[1][8] in addition to the standard TCP/IP, and both the SMTP and DEC's Mail-11 protocols.

Notably, Ultrix implemented the inter-process communication (IPC) facilities found in System V (named pipes, messages, semaphores, and shared memory).

Ultrix-32 supported SCSI disks and tapes[9] and also proprietary Digital Storage Systems Interconnect and CI peripherals employing DEC's Mass Storage Control Protocol, although lacking the OpenVMS distributed lock manager it did not support concurrent access from multiple Ultrix systems.

[citation needed] The absence of memory-mapped file support was regarded as a particular deficiency with Ultrix in comparison to its competitors in the early 1990s.

[12] Later, DEC replaced Ultrix with OSF/1 on Alpha, ending Unix development on the MIPS and VAX platforms.