From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:13:02 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] Ideas for a Unix paper I'm writing In-Reply-To: <20110628001140.GA23711@minnie.tuhs.org> References: <20110628001140.GA23711@minnie.tuhs.org> Message-ID: <20110628041302.GR39651@dereel.lemis.com> On Tuesday, 28 June 2011 at 10:11:40 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: > > I'm having some trouble thinking of the right way to explain what is > an elegant design at the OS/syscall level, so any inspirations/ideas > would be most welcome. I might highlight a couple of syscall groups: > open/close/read/write, and fork/exec/exit/wait. The system call interface is one thing, but I'm not sure it's the most important one. Older operating systems (in my experience, IBM OS/360 and UNIVAC Omega and OS 1100) had similar interfaces. Omega also had the concept of integer file descriptors (including 0, 1 and 2 preassigned). All of these systems had open/close/read/write, for example. I came to UNIX relatively late, and my first impression wasn't favourable. It took me a while to realise what the real advantages were. For me, they're: - Text files. At the time, any data of any importance was stored in custom-designed file formats. That was more efficient, both in terms of processing time and space, but it made things difficult if anything went wrong. - The file system itself. I think the design of the file system, especially the separation of names and the files themselves, but also special files, is one of the most far-reaching designs I've ever come across. To this day, I haven't found anything that even comes close. You might also get some ideas from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy Greg -- Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. See http://www.lemis.com/grog/email/signed-mail.php for more details. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 196 bytes Desc: not available URL: