From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2017 08:19:42 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] Dash options
Message-ID: <20171128131942.6705918C092@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

    > Multics had some kind of `attach' and `detach' of I/O streams, well
    > known to Ossanna, so perhaps dup(2), and a Thompson-shell syntax to go
    > with it meant `>' was earmarked early on.

According to "The Evolution of the Unix Timesharing System", full path names
arrived later than I/O redirection, so by they time they needed a separator,
'>' and '<' were gone. '/' also has the advantage of being a non-shift
character!

	Noel

PS: Re-reading that, I see that early Unix did not have an exec() call (as I
was just discussing); it was done in user mode, with normal read and write
calls.