From: Michelangelo De Simone <michel@ngelo.eu>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] RUNCOM and Multics: the origin of "rc" file
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2022 20:44:05 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <A5C3FB0D-D49B-411A-92BD-2C90658A4CE5@ngelo.eu> (raw)
Hi,
long time lurker here. Today I ended up on an article by Christian Lee Seibold about the origin of shells [1].
Coincidentally the article explained how the “rc” files came to be and why they’re called “rc”: everything started with RUNCOM and Multics. An excerpt from the article:
====
Unix Shells have had a very long history, and it all starts with a program written by Louis Pouzin for the MIT CTSS Operating System, called RUNCOM (which stood for “run commands”). It executed commands from a file, called “a runcom”. According to Kernighan and Ritchie[1], “rc” configuration files from Unix descended from this. Tom Van Vleck also gives origins of Unix’s use of “rc” to RUNCOM [2], and notes that the first time he read the term “shell” was from Multics documentation created by Doug Eastwood. According to Louis Pouzin, he coined the word “shell”.
====
Well, now I know…
[1] https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/auragem.space/~krixano/ShellHistory-Unix.pdf
— Michelangelo
reply other threads:[~2022-07-25 3:44 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: [no followups] expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=A5C3FB0D-D49B-411A-92BD-2C90658A4CE5@ngelo.eu \
--to=michel@ngelo.eu \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).