[TUHS] BSD job control, aka the guy, etc

Mary Ann Horton mah at mhorton.net
Wed Jan 11 13:19:44 AEST 2017


Yes, ITS and Tenex/TOPS were the inspiration for UNIX ^Z.  When I was at 
Berkeley, of course we didn't have windowing environments, we had dumb 
terminals, and it was nice to be able to interrupt a long-running job 
for a shell command.  I recall asking for it, and I think Bill put it 
into csh.


On 01/10/2017 12:52 PM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> I asked:
>> I wonder where the inspiration for the Unix job control came from?  In
>> particular, I can't help but notice that Control-Z does something very
>> similar in the PDP-10 Incompatible Timesharing System.
> Jim Kulp answered:
>> The ITS capabilities were certainly part of the inspiration.  It was a
>> combination of frustrations and gaps in UNIX with some of those
>> features found in ITS that resulted in the final package of features.




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