31 Jul
2018
31 Jul
'18
7:25 a.m.
I've got his Operating System Principles and The Architecture of
Concurrent Programs. I've seen his Programming a Personal Computer -
about the Edison dialect of Pascal as a systems programming language,
an offshoot of Concurrent Pascal, iirc.
I'm slightly amused by his statement published in the Wikipedia
article on him, :
"There, his first significant project was writing a parser for a COBOL
compiler for the Siemens 3003 computer. Subsequently, he wrote a file
system to be used during execution of the compiled COBOL programs,
later observing "I now understand that it was really a small operating
system, I had programmed. However, in the mid 1960s, the dividing line
between language implementation and operating systems was still not
clearly understood."[ "
Which is quite an understatement - it is probably one of the reasons
why Prof Lions considered Solo unsuitable as a general purpose OS for
students to work with and work on. It would not be impossible to
develop a non-Pascal-based OS on the Concurrent Pascal microkernel,
but I don't get the impression that he had planned for it.
http://pascal.hansotten.com/per-brinch-hansen/ is a good site about him.
Wesley Parish
On 7/31/18, Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 2018-07-30 8:40 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
[ I've always posted these to TUHS with no
objections, so I have no idea
whether COFF would be a better forum; feel free to spank me (I might
even enjoy it!) ]
We lost Per Brinch Hansen, a computer scientist, on this day in 2007.
He specialised in operating systems and concurrent programming, and
wrote the classic book "Operating System Principles" which was published
in six languages for decades. He also wrote another book "The
Architecture of Concurrent Programs" which demonstrated an entire
operating system written in Concurrent Pascal (much like the Lions'
books on Unix).
His anthology "Classic Operating Systems" is also an informative read
and I think can be found online.
--Toby
-- Dave