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Unix and Multics History
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
McIlroy echoed these thoughts, mentioning that Bell Labs "had a million dollars worth of equipment in the attic that was sitting there being played with by three people. The ls command, control arguments, shell scripts... lots of things felt so similar to Multics that I could go right to work, consulting man pages occasionally to find out what the Unix name of something was. UnixMulticslslist (ls)cpcopy (cp)pwdprint_wdir (pwd)cdchange_wdir (cwd)mailmailififloginlogin (l)logoutlogoutwhowhomanhelp The first time I remember the name "shell" for the function of finding and running a command was in a Multics Design Notebook document by Louis Pouzin of MIT Comp Center.
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