Paper summaries of the week

Digest of the research papers presenting the UNIX Operating System.

Hello! Today I will be sharing the digest of two great research papers about the UNIX Operating System.

#1

The first is about “The UNIX Time-Sharing System”, a paper published in 1974 by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson presenting the main aspects of the UNIX Operating System with its file system, I/O operations, process synchronization, and the shell implementation.

https://andreybleme.com/2020-12-17/the-unix-time-sharing-sytem-summary

#2

10 years later Dennis M. Ritchie publishes “The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System” describing the UNIX file system, the process-control mechanism, and the idea of pipelined commands. This paper also presents the social events that influenced the system’s evolution.

https://andreybleme.com/2020-12-29/the-evolution-unix-time-sharing-sytem-summary

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An interesting fact that you might not be aware of, is that Dennis M. Ritchie is the guy who created the C programming language. In both these papers, you can see his contributions to UNIX, and the moment when the UNIX team decided to rewrite its assembler using C lang.

See you next week!