[TUHS] Pipes and PRISM

Last week there was a bit of discussion about the different shells that would eventually lead to srb writing the shell that took his name and the command syntax and semantics that most modern shells use today. Some of you may remember, VMS had a command interpreter called DCL (Digital Command language), part of an attempt to make command syntax uniform across DEC's different operating systems (TOPS-20 also used DCL). As DEC started to recognize the value of the Unix marketplace, a project was born in DEC's Commercial Languages and Tools group to bring the Unix Bourne shell to VMS and to sell it as a product they called DEC Shell. I had been part of that effort and one of the issues we had to solve is providing formal UNIX pipe semantics. They of course needed to somehow implement UNIX style process pipelines. VMS from the beginning has had an interprocess communications pseudo-device called the mailbox that can be written to and read from via the usual I/O mechanism (the QIO system service). A large problem with them is that it is not possible to detect the "broken pipe" condition with a mailbox and that feature deficiency made them unsuitable for use with DEC Shell. So the team had me write a new device driver, based closely on the mailbox driver, but that could detect broken pipes lines UNIX-style. Shortly after I finished the VMS pipe driver, the team at DECwest had started work on the MICA project, which was Dave Culter's proposed OS unification. Dave's team had developed a machine architecture called PRISM (Proposed RISC Machine) to be the VAX follow-on. For forward compatibility purposes, PRISM would have to support both Ultrix and VMS. Dave and team had already written a microkernel-based, lightweight OS for VAX called VAXeln that was intended for real-time applications. His new idea was to have a MACH-like microkernel OS which he called MICA and then to put three user mode personality modules on top of that: P.VMS, implementing the VMS system services and ABI P.Ultrix, implementing the Unix system calls and ABI P.TBD, a new OS API and ABI intended to supersede VMS So I wrote the attached "why pipes" memo to explain to Cutler's team why it was important to implement pipes natively in P.TBD if they wanted that OS to be a viable follow-on to VMS and Ultrix. In the end, Dick Sites's 64-bit RISC machine architecture proposal, which was called Alpha, won out over PRISM. Cutler and a bunch of his DECwest engineering team went off to Microsoft. Dave's idea of a microkernel-based OS with multiple personalities of course saw the light of day originally as NT OS/2, but because of the idea of multiple personalities, when Microsoft and IBM divorced Dave was able to quickly pivot to the now infamous Win32 personality, as what would be called Windows NT. It was also easy for Softway Systems to later complete the NT POSIX layer for their Interix product, which now a few generations later is called WSL by Microsoft. -Paul W.