THE
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- "THE" is the abbreviation of "Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven", the then-name (in Dutch) of the Eindhoven University of Technology, where Dijkstra developed the operating system of that name.
- "THE" is also an acronym for The Hessling Editor, or a completely different program with a different purpose that was called "The Humane".
THE was an early multitasking (but not multi-user) computer operating system developed by Edsger Dijkstra and his team. It was notable because Dijkstra was forced, by limited numbers of developers and poor built-in support for debugging, to use quasi-formal methods and a structured 5-level hierarchical division of the kernel much like MULTICS' later ring-segmentation model; it apparently also introduced the first forms of memory segmentation, freeing programmers from being forced to use actual physical locations on the drum memory.
THE was designed for the Dutch Electrologica EL X8 computer, with 32K core memory, a 512K drum, paper tape readers, paper tape punches and printers.
THE was written in assembly, but incrementally. Level 0 (processor management and allocation) was written before Level 1 (memory management), which itself was written before Level 2 (handling the device driver for the keyboard and such), and so on. Level 3 buffers and unbuffers input and output streams. Level 4 consists of user programs. Level 5 is the operator.
[edit] References
- E. W. Dijkstra . EWD 126: 'The Multiprogramming System for the EL X8 THE (manuscript). 14 June 1965. text [1] PDF [2]
- E. W. Dijkstra, The structure of the 'THE'-multiprogramming system, Commun. ACM 11 (1968), 5: 341-346.
- E. W. Dijkstra . EWD 196: 'The structure of the 'THE'-multiprogramming system (manuscript) text [3] PDF [4]
[edit] See also
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