Re: [TUHS] Etymology of "shell"?

On Saturday, 26 December 2015 at 11:09:00 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: As so frequently, the Oxford English Dictionary has surprisingly good coverage. This is a draft addition after 33 other main meaning groups: b. In some operating systems (originally Multics and Unix): a program that translates commands keyed by the user into commands that the operating system can act on, thereby providing a high-level interface with the user. Also (more fully shell window): a window in which such commands can be invoked. 1974 Communications Assoc. Computing Machinery 17 371/1 For most users, communication with unix is carried on with the aid of a program called the Shell. The Shell is a command line interpreter. That's the earliest dated reference, but the mention of Multics matches what you said. I've also taken a look through the sources of CTSS, and the only mention of SHELL there was as a local variable of a function that might be called FLSRTN (not sure I'm reading the aseembler output correctly). That suggests that the name wasn't used for the command interpreter. In the file com2 (which is a listing) I see things like: 1 .MAIN - MAIN CONTROL FOR COMMAND ABBREVIATION AND CHAINING PROG. 05/12/69 1512.1 PAGE 3 READ AND ASSEMBLE COMMAND LINE FROM CLS OR INPUT BUFFER. That sounds like it could be the command interpreter, but there's no documentation, and it's easy to misinterpret these things. I've sent mail to Tom Van Vleck, who will be able to shed more light on this. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua