From: Tarik Nesh-Nash (tarikn_at_microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jan 07 2004 - 17:09:07 PST
This paper describes the PDP- 11/40 UNIX system and provides a description of the file system and its implementation then provides a description of its user interface; the shell.
It will be hard to grasp all the information if the reader has no prior knowledge with the described system. The shell commands are briefly commented and there is no deep technical details about its implementation, I would recommend this paper as an introductory user manual to the UNIX system.
Most of the information in this document is still valid for current UNIX shells, and this raises a question about the progress that was made in this area. What is pushing change in this field? How important is backward compatibility? Was the 1974 system so perfect that the industry and academia decided to adopt it and improve it?
Reading this papers is very enriching, however, I feel that a more thorough reading of related and referenced papers will greatly enhance my understanding. For example, this system is compared to the Berkeley and the Multics system. An ideal situation is to be able to view clearly the differences between these systems.
It is also interesting to see that the paper dicusses subjects like reliability, performance, convenience for programmers). It seems that these issues were known at that time, however, not enough priority was assigned to it.
at the end, I would agree with the author that the paper makes UNIX as an appealing choice: "simple, elegant and easy to use".
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