From: Steve Arnold (steve.arnold4_at_verizon.net)
Date: Tue Jan 06 2004 - 20:55:20 PST
Although quite obviously an early paper, the Dijkstra paper tries to give an
overview of "THE," and early multiprogramming system (not actually referred
to as an operating system). He describes it in a progress report format,
first giving an introduction to their project. He describes the concept,
which is several layers of hierarchy, each mostly independent of one
another. The layers are: 0) processor allocation, 1) segment controller, 2)
console, 3) stream buffering, 4) user programs, and 5) operator.
For a paper circa 1967, the author explains what are some fairly advanced OS
concepts, albeit at a rather abstract level. The terminology has changed,
but must of what is talked about exists in OSes today. (For example
scheduling, referred to as processor allocation by the author.) It is
interesting how he mentions that they did not allocate enough resources to
debugging and the such, as this is what we spend a lot of time on when
designing today.
In my opinion, this is not one of Dijkstra's best works. His writing style
was conversational and he spent a lot of time explaining why this paper
would be not be too formal and why the project was not too structured. I
also found that it was not very scientific. There was no data to support his
results and no specific examples of how this was implemented. The setup of
the paper, explaining the hierarchy, was the part that I found most
valuable.
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