The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* [TUHS] RUNCOM and Multics: the origin of "rc" file
@ 2022-07-25  3:44 Michelangelo De Simone
  0 siblings, 0 replies; only message in thread
From: Michelangelo De Simone @ 2022-07-25  3:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

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




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] only message in thread

only message in thread, other threads:[~2022-07-25  3:44 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: (only message) (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-07-25  3:44 [TUHS] RUNCOM and Multics: the origin of "rc" file Michelangelo De Simone

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).