As this was the era of minicomputers, with their many architectural variations, and also the beginning of the market for 16-bit microprocessors, many ports were completed within the first few years of its release.

The first Sun workstations (then based on the Motorola 68000) ran a V7 port by UniSoft;[2] the first version of Xenix for the Intel 8086 was derived from V7 and Onyx Systems soon produced a Zilog Z8000 computer running V7.

Interdata sold the port as Edition VII, making it the first commercial UNIX offering.

V7M, developed by DEC's original Unix Engineering Group (UEG), contained many enhancements to the kernel for the PDP-11 line of computers including significantly improved hardware error recovery and many additional device drivers.

At the time of its release, though, its greatly extended feature set came at the expense of a decrease in performance compared to V6, which was to be corrected largely by the user community.

Linux 5.15.0 has 449 system calls and FreeBSD 8.0 has over 450.In 2002, Caldera International released[6] V7 as FOSS under a permissive BSD-like software license.