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Themes
of Operating Systems Research at Bell Labs
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Dennis RitchieHead
of System Software Research Dept.
Bell
Laboratories,
Lucent Technologies
600
Mountain Avenue Murray Hill, NJ 07974
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Abstract
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the years since 1969, the work in computer operating systems
within Bell Labs research has shown a consistency of approach
even as it has evolved. This talk will discuss the main ideas
that that we have followed over the years, some of the historical
development, and some of their current applications. |
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architectural approach that we have followed most faithfully
is to represent system resources as files in a hierarchical
naming scheme, and which are accessed by read-write operations.
This was present even in very early Unix systems using "device
files" and with "pipes" for connecting programs. This is considerably
generalized in the later Plan 9 and Inferno systems. |
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Our
technological approach emphasizes portability: creating systems
that can be moved across various hardware platforms, and even
imported into other systems. This means not only writing in
a relatively machine-independent language, but also choosing
portable data presentation formats. The sociological approach
turns on openness: although the actual code for Unix has been
traditionally proprietary, the standards for its interface
have been open, as have the languages we have developed in
the Unix context, like C, C++, awk, and many others. Although
the influence of these approaches has been felt far outside
Bell Labs, and others seem today to be gaining more directly
than Lucent from our long-term research, still there are some
new products from the company that use the latest research
work, in particular the Pathstar Access Server.
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Biography
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 Dennis
M. Ritchie is head of the System Software Research Department within
the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, the research
and development organization of Lucent Technologies. He joined Bell
Laboratories in 1968 after obtaining his graduate and undergraduate
degrees from Harvard University. He assisted Ken Thompson in creating
the Unix operating system, and is the primary designer of the C language,
in which Unix, as well as many other systems, are written. He contributed
to the technical development of Unix as it evolved, in research versions
and as a standard, and helped to foster the Plan 9 and Inferno systems.
He continues to work in operating systems and languages. |
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is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, is a Bell Laboratories
Fellow, and has received several honors, including the ACM Turing
award, several IEEE medals, the NEC C&C Foundation award, and the
US National Medal of Technology. |
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