From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tim.newsham@gmail.com (Tim Newsham) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:22:58 -1000 Subject: [TUHS] Ideas for a Unix paper I'm writing In-Reply-To: References: <20110628001140.GA23711@minnie.tuhs.org> <20110628041302.GR39651@dereel.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 7:48 PM, Nick Downing wrote: > Another really important thing to mention is the Bourne shell, it's > kind of the glue that sticks it all together, and a bit of a > masterpiece in itself, being fraught with compromise but having > programmability and a batch capability without taking away from its > main purpose of being a useable interactive shell. ... but not a great feature to talk about when celebrating 1st editions 10th birthday, since 1st edition didn't have that fancy shmancy shell :) http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/sh > cheers, Nick > > On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: >> 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 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TUHS mailing list >> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs >> >> > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > -- Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com