UUCP was originally written at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Mike Lesk. By 1978 it was in use on 82 UNIX machines inside the Bell system, primarily for software distribution. It was released in 1979 as part of Version 7 Unix. The original UUCP was rewritten by AT&T researchers Peter Honeyman, David A. Nowitz, and Brian E. Redman around 1983. The rewrite is referred to as "HDB" or "HoneyDanBer" uucp, which was later enhanced, bug fixed, and repackaged as "BNU UUCP" ("Basic Network Utilities").