Re: shells The Design of Design

According to Thomas Koenig  <tkoenig@netcologne.de>:

I was not around, but my impression is that by time of creation of UNIX
it was a common understanding. For example, DEC supplied RSX-11 with
DCL at about the same time [as UNIX got Thompson shell) and I never
heard that anybody considered it novel.

>
The Thompson shell was still restricted to GOTO (as was the RSX-11
shell).

You're probably thinking of the Mashey shell. One of the first usenix
tapes has patches I wrote in about 1976 to add simple variables with
single character names to that shell.  It was an improvement, but the
Bourne shell was way better.

Re when this stuff was invented, I did some work on CP/67 when I was
in high school in about 1970 and I recall that even then people
routinely ran files of CMS commands. Don't remember whether there were
variables and control flow or that came later with REXX.

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