A book on the design of the UNIX operating system

[Jim Reid]

In article <302 at ge1cbx.UUCP> gerald at ge1cbx.UUCP (Gerald Aden) writes:
>A co-worker mentioned a book on the design of the UNIX operating system
>that puts Bach's book to shame.  He didn't know the name of the author or
>the exact title of the book but thought that it was written by some guy in
>Australia.  Does anyone know of such a book and whether or not it is still
>available?

The "book" you mention is actually two volumes. One is a complete
listing of the V6 kernel source code and the other is a commentary on
the code. There are also chapters on the PDP11 architecture and its
instruction set. This was produced by John Lions of the University of
News South Wales in Australia. It is based on his course notes from
an advanced operating systems course he used to teach in the (pre V7?)
days that AT&T/Western Electric allowed universities to teach UNIX
internals.

It was only distributed with the release tapes by Bell Labs to sites
with V6 and maybe V7 source licencees. Since it contains proprietary
information (kernel source), the volumes are not for sale and never were
generally available. As far as I'm aware, no publisher has had the two
books for sale. You had to have a source licence to get a copy through
Bell Labs and that was the only legal source (excuse the pun!) of copies.

		Jim

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