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From: fkittred@bbn.com (Fletcher Kittredge)
Newsgroups: comp.os.mach
Subject: Re: Publisher and Release Date For Mach Book ?
Message-ID: <64883@bbn.BBN.COM>
Date: 27 Jun 91 12:20:35 GMT
References: <1991Jun26.182905.11834@cherokee.uswest.com> <32674@dime.cs.umass.edu>
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In article <32674@dime.cs.umass.edu> nahum@unreal.cs.umass.edu (Erich Nahum) writes:
>In article <1991Jun26.182905.11834@cherokee.uswest.com> naim@prairie.uswest.com (Naim Abdullah) writes:
>>I have heard of a forthcoming book on Mach:
>>
>>  	"The Design of the Mach Operating system"
>>                         by
>>  	N. Bitar, A. Langermann and E. Sheinbrood
>
>How can a book with this title not have Rick Rashid on the author list?

Why do you think that Richie and Thompson never wrote a book on the design of
the Unix operating system?  Who is this man Bach anyhow?

>
>I've read a lot of Mach papers, but I haven't heard of these people.  
>Perhaps they're from Mt. Xinu?

Really?  You seemed to have missed much.  At Encore, A. Langermann has done some of
the most significant work on taking Mach and making it really work.  Perhaps you
should include in your Mach education with some of his many papers on the subject.
Two that I though where in everyone's canon are:

Mach/4.3BSD a Conservative Approach to Parallelization
	Joseph Boykin and Alan Langerman
	Computing Systems, Vol. 3, No. 1

A Highly-Parallelized Mach-based Vnode Filesystem
        Alan Langerman et al.
        Proceedings of Winter 1990 Usenix Conference, Jan. 1990
 
If you don't know whom Eric Sheinbrood is you are really out of touch.  It is even
more difficult to conceive that you could be involved with Mach and not know
whom N. Bitar is.  However, I understand through UCLA and the ACM he is
continuing to offer courses in Mach internals, so perhaps you could catch
one.

>
>Wouldn't it make sense that people who actually did work on the system, 
>like Tevanian, Young, Golub, Fitzgerald (OK, Accent), and Black, be 
>involved with the book?

No, it wouldn't necessarily make sense.  Writing a book takes an enormous amount
of effort.  Not everyone has the time or energy to devote to the process.  Some
of the people on this list are real busy doing other important things.  If memory
serves, I think this book orignally had some of the people on this list as authors.
My guess is that they were to busy to contribute.

>
>Seriously though, perhaps someone at CMU can comment as to the
>authenticity of this book, the authors' involvement, etc.

I don't understand what you are implying here.  Do you think that Langermann et.
al. are going to deceive us about the design of Mach?
>
>-Erich
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Erich Nahum                            A305 Lederle Graduate Research Center
>Real-Time Systems Group                Department of Computer Science     
>nahum@cs.umass.edu                     University of Massachusetts at Amherst
>(413) 545-4753                         Amherst, MA 01003                      


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