[HN Gopher] Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (...
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Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980) [pdf]
Author : jakeypakey
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-10-19 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (courses.cs.washington.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (courses.cs.washington.edu)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Note that Grant Avery, a fictional character in my book [1] about
| the Xerox Star, is a manager of Pilot for six months or so. He
| was very old-school and didn't last. There _was_ a real person
| like that, but Grant 's not modeled after him.
|
| It's amusing that Grant asks the team "will third-party software
| be able to run on Pilot?" Dave Redell tells me that no one ever
| asked that, as far as he can recall.
|
| Nearly all the authors are still around, except for Steve Purcell
| who was killed in a bike accident quite recently.
|
| Also, my book avoids hindsight, but [1] has a section "So what
| _should_ Xerox have done? "
|
| [1] https://www.albertcory.io
| ModernMech wrote:
| Pilot is cool because it's basically bare metal Mesa. Written in
| Mesa, runs only Mesa programs, and leverages features of the Mesa
| language for OS security (e.g. Mesa's capability system).
|
| Other cool projects like this:
|
| - Cedar was both a PL and an OS:
| https://www.ics.uci.edu/~andre/ics228s2006/swinehartzellwege...
|
| - The Oberon OS and Oberon PL
| https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon1992.pdf
|
| - A Scheme OS called MrEd:
| https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/icfp99-ffkf.pdf
|
| You might even throw the JVM and Smalltalk into this category.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Cedar's link is broken.
|
| This is a good one,
| https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteCedarProgra...
| ModernMech wrote:
| Thanks!
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, Oberon used to be available from the Mac App Store.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| I'm having a hard time finding documents describing Mesa's
| capability system, although the term capability system has come
| up repeatedly in conversation, so I'm intrigued as to what this
| refers to exactly. Any documents that you can point us to?
| Thanks.
| [deleted]
| pmcjones wrote:
| I'm an author of the Pilot paper (and also a participant in
| the much earlier capability-oriented CAL TSS for the Control
| Data 6400: https://www.mcjones.org/CalTSS/). Pilot was a long
| time ago, but as I recall its capabilities were just Mesa
| records with some "option" bits plus a unique identifier for
| the file. So a malicious program could easily fabricate one.
| wmf wrote:
| http://www.cap-lore.com/CapTheory/
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Thanks!
| mhd wrote:
| There's a quite nifty and recent demonstration of Cedar on
| YouTube.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
| fzzzy wrote:
| Wow, it even includes capabilities. Impressive.
| rbanffy wrote:
| "Pilot's protection mechanisms are defensive, rather than
| absolute [9], since in a single-user system, errors are a more
| serious problem than maliciousness"
|
| Oh well... We were so wrong back then...
| apples_oranges wrote:
| This holds still true for many computers today
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Well that was true for almost 20 years from the writing of TFA.
| Yes, there were things like boot-sector viruses, but they were
| not a huge issue.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'm certainly guilty of being optimistic in terms of threat
| models back then.
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