Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!jr@bbn.com
From: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Op Environment vs Op System (was: NeXT not revolutionary enough?)
Message-ID: <32289@bbn.COM>
Date: 15 Nov 88 06:39:12 GMT
References: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu> <48@necbsd.NEC.COM> <26446@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <4833@polya.Stanford.EDU> <145@avsd.UUCP> <4163@encore.UUCP>
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Reply-To: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
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In-reply-to: bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein)

In article <4163@encore.UUCP>, bzs@encore (Barry Shein) writes:
>>I would assume that this functional division between the two [OS, "shell"]
>>has been existent
>>ever since OSes were designed, rather than conglomerated.
>
>This is not exactly a theoretical point one needs to make assumptions
>about, show an operating system with this property before around 1970
>when Unix began this sort of thing. There may be some definitional
>problems, however, as to exactly what is meant by the first claim.
The TENEX "exec" was a program that you could ask the system to run
for you, in an "inferior exec" if (for example) you wanted to suspend
the interactive things you were doing and go off to look at a file or
whatever.  This dates to about 1970.  Given the coincidence with Unix,
howver, I suspect the idea has a common ancestor in either Multics or
the SDS 940 operating system.  I'll try to dig up more on this since
it seems to be of interest.
--
/jr
jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr