From: Brian Milnes (brianmilnes_at_qwest.net)
Date: Wed Jan 14 2004 - 09:41:31 PST
> The UNIX Time Sharing System - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
>
>
>
> The authors describe the history and architecture of the UNIX operating
> system. They feel UNIX is most important for providing a large amount of
> powerful features for a reasonable cost ($40,000 or about $240,000 today).
> The system provides a suite of compilers, interpreters and document
> preparation tools. The use of the C programming language to build the
kernel
> was perhaps their greatest innovation. Using a high level language that
> allowed access to the system hardware and data representations without
> escaping into assembly code (like BLISS) made their system cheaper to
build
> and very portable.
>
> Their directory structure used access control lists and was unique in that
> it contained self and parent links in each directories, allowed mounting
and
> unmounting of file systems and had special files which represent devices.
> These special files are very powerful in that much of the system's
> functionality is available in a single name space.
>
>
>
> They have a standard multiple process semantics with one exception: pipes.
> These untyped communication channels between processes can be written and
> read using the standard file IO commands and allowed their shell to easily
> build powerful combinations of commands. One of the weakest pieces of
their
> process semantics is their exception handling in signals. Signals often
don'
> t contain enough information to fully understand what went wrong and where
> and in process groups are often delivered to a process that has no idea
what
> to do with them.
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Wed Jan 14 2004 - 09:41:40 PST