The DOI matches its Crossref record.
The UNIX time-sharing system
Abstract
UNIX is a general-purpose, multi-user, interactive operating system for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/40 and 11/45 computers. It offers a number of features seldom found even in a larger operating systems, including: (1) a hierarchical file system incorporating demountable volumes; (2) compatible file, device, and inter-process I/O; (3) the ability to initiate asynchronous processes; (4) system command language selectable on a per-user basis; and (5) over 100 subsystems including a dozen languages. This paper discusses the nature and implementation of the file system and of the user command interface.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 6
- 10.1145/363848.363863 · DOI
- Richards M. BCPL, Proc. AFIPS 1969 SJCC, 34, 557
- 10.1145/800197.806050 · DOI
- 1971, Aleph-null. Computer Recreations. Software Practice and Experience, 1, 2
- 10.1145/800212.806497 · DOI
- 10.1145/361268.361271 · DOI · Paper page
Cited by
Tanenbaum, A. S., & Van Renesse, R. (1985) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/6041.6074 · Cited by 990
Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
(2008) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.46-2158 · Cited by 709
Shoring up persistent applications
Carey, M. J., DeWitt, D. J., Franklin, M. J., Hall, N. E., McAuliffe, M. L., Naughton, J. F., Schuh, D. T., Solomon, M. H., Tan, C. K., Tsatalos, O. G., et al. (1994) · Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data · doi:10.1145/191839.191915 · Cited by 420
Circuit-Based Quantum Random Access Memory for Classical Data
Park, D. K., Petruccione, F., & Rhee, J.-K. K. (2019) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-019-40439-3 · Cited by 151
The cognitive architecture for chaining of two mental operations
Sackur, J., & Dehaene, S. (2009) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.01.010 · Cited by 73
Metadata
- Authors
- Ritchie, D. M., & Thompson, K.
- Venue
- Communications of the ACM
- Published
- 1983-01
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 84-89
- ISSN
- 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-7317
- OpenAlex
- W2105986919
- Cited by
- 960
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 235.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The UNIX time-sharing system. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/357980.358014
- The paper
- Ritchie, D. M., & Thompson, K. (1983). The UNIX time-sharing system. Communications of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/357980.358014
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.