>From tx.religion: On the convergence of topics: I wonder if anyone has ever researched Bell Laboratories' original claims to the Unix operating system and to the C language that was used to write Unix. The reason I say this is that Maurice Halstead was the developer of a language called Pilot that had the practical feature of allowing assembly language statements mixed with Pilot-language statements. It was a revolutionary idea at the time, but you could write a Pilot compiler for a new machine in Pilot by a process called "bootstrapping" that included the germ of the idea for the C language cross-compiler. In fact, Halstead wrote a toy operating system for the then popular Univac 1108 computer and demonstrated feasibility by running this operating system on the Univac.
I think it wasn't just a coincidence that the Unix developers at Bell Laboratories wrote Unix in C. I think they borrowed the concept from Maurice Halstead, then did what they could to downgrade the importance of Halstead's work. I think you can find paraphrases of the Pilot operating system in the original Unix kernel. These are as yet unsubstantiated claims, but I think the Linux developers have among them some veterans of Halstead's classes at Purdue, and I think they would do well to re-investigate the Pilot operating system and its connection with the original Unix kernel. Are you listening, my old graduate students from Purdue? _______________________________________________ Lynx-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lynx-dev
