110-580: The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution ( BSD ) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix , developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley . Since the original has become obsolete, the term "BSD" is commonly used for its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD , OpenBSD , NetBSD , and DragonFly BSD . BSD
220-517: A Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal. On this terminal, the Escape key was at the location now occupied by the Tab key on the widely used IBM PC keyboard (on the left side of the alphabetic part of the keyboard, one row above the middle row). This made it a convenient choice for switching vi modes. Also, the keys h , j , k , l served double duty as cursor movement keys and were inscribed with arrows, which
330-484: A hard link to ex, such that when invoked as vi, ex would automatically start up in its visual mode. Thus, vi is not the evolution of ex, vi is ex. Joy described ex 2.0 (vi) as a very large program, barely able to fit in the memory of a PDP-11/70 , thus although vi may be regarded as a small, lightweight program today, it was not seen that way early in its history. By version 3.1, shipped with 3BSD in December 1979,
440-453: A sabbatical from Bell Labs and came to Berkeley as a visiting professor. He helped to install Version 6 Unix and started working on a Pascal implementation for the system. Graduate students Chuck Haley and Bill Joy improved Thompson's Pascal and implemented an improved text editor, ex . Other universities became interested in the software at Berkeley, and so in 1977 Joy started compiling the first Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD), which
550-428: A system call to perform a block I/O write operation, then the system call might execute the following instructions: While the writing takes place, the operating system will context switch to other processes as normal. When the device finishes writing, the device will interrupt the currently running process by asserting an interrupt request . The device will also place an integer onto the data bus. Upon accepting
660-489: A binary compatibility layer . This is much simpler and faster than emulation ; for example, it allows applications intended for Linux to be run at effectively full speed. This makes BSDs not only suitable for server environments, but also for workstation ones, given the increasing availability of commercial or closed-source software for Linux only. This also allows administrators to migrate legacy commercial applications, which may have only supported commercial Unix variants, to
770-487: A bit more BSD-flavored than SysVish, but it was pretty eclectic. Eric S. Raymond summarizes the longstanding relationship between System V and BSD, stating, "The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs; programmers and technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more business-oriented types with AT&T and System V." In 1989, David A. Curry wrote about the differences between BSD and System V. He characterized System V as being often regarded as
880-645: A computer even if they are not compatible with the base operating system. A library operating system (libOS) is one in which the services that a typical operating system provides, such as networking, are provided in the form of libraries and composed with a single application and configuration code to construct a unikernel : a specialized (only the absolute necessary pieces of code are extracted from libraries and bound together ), single address space , machine image that can be deployed to cloud or embedded environments. The operating system code and application code are not executed in separated protection domains (there
990-527: A development of MULTICS for a single user. Because UNIX's source code was available, it became the basis of other, incompatible operating systems, of which the most successful were AT&T 's System V and the University of California 's Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). To increase compatibility, the IEEE released the POSIX standard for operating system application programming interfaces (APIs), which
1100-611: A free Unix-style editor would have to look elsewhere. By 1985, a version of Emacs ( MicroEMACS ) was available for a variety of platforms, but it was not until June 1987 that STEVIE (ST Editor for VI Enthusiasts), a limited vi clone, appeared for the Atari ST . In early January 1990, Steve Kirkendall posted a new clone of vi, Elvis , to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix, aiming for a more complete and more faithful clone of vi than STEVIE. It quickly attracted considerable interest in
1210-484: A large legal settlement was paid. In the twenty-first century, Windows continues to be popular on personal computers but has less market share of servers. UNIX operating systems, especially Linux, are the most popular on enterprise systems and servers but are also used on mobile devices and many other computer systems. On mobile devices, Symbian OS was dominant at first, being usurped by BlackBerry OS (introduced 2002) and iOS for iPhones (from 2007). Later on,
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#17327725946781320-442: A library with no protection between applications, such as eCos . A hypervisor is an operating system that runs a virtual machine . The virtual machine is unaware that it is an application and operates as if it had its own hardware. Virtual machines can be paused, saved, and resumed, making them useful for operating systems research, development, and debugging. They also enhance portability by enabling applications to be run on
1430-576: A long time, and when they did buy screens for everyone, they got Tektronix 4014s . These were large storage tube displays. You can't run a screen editor on a storage-tube display as the picture can't be updated. Thus it had to fall to someone else to pioneer screen editing for Unix, and that was us initially, and we continued to do so for many years. Coulouris considered the cryptic commands of ed to be only suitable for "immortals", and thus in February 1976, he enhanced ed (using Ken Thompson's ed source as
1540-447: A malformed machine instruction . However, the most common error conditions are division by zero and accessing an invalid memory address . Users can send messages to the kernel to modify the behavior of a currently running process. For example, in the command-line environment , pressing the interrupt character (usually Control-C ) might terminate the currently running process. To generate software interrupts for x86 CPUs,
1650-481: A more modern operating system, retaining the functionality of such applications until they can be replaced by a better alternative. Current BSD operating system variants support many of the common IEEE , ANSI , ISO , and POSIX standards, while retaining most of the traditional BSD behavior. Like AT&T Unix , the BSD kernel is monolithic , meaning that device drivers in the kernel run in privileged mode , as part of
1760-485: A number of enthusiast communities. Andrew Tanenbaum quickly asked the community to decide on one of these two editors to be the vi clone in Minix ; Elvis was chosen, and remains the vi clone for Minix today. In 1989, Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz began porting BSD Unix to run on 386 class processors, but to create a free distribution they needed to avoid any AT&T-contaminated code, including Joy's vi. To fill
1870-455: A particular application's memory is stored, or even whether or not it has been allocated yet. In modern operating systems, memory which is accessed less frequently can be temporarily stored on a disk or other media to make that space available for use by other programs. This is called swapping , as an area of memory can be used by multiple programs, and what that memory area contains can be swapped or exchanged on demand. Virtual memory provides
1980-503: A program does not interfere with memory already in use by another program. Since programs time share, each program must have independent access to memory. Cooperative memory management, used by many early operating systems, assumes that all programs make voluntary use of the kernel 's memory manager, and do not exceed their allocated memory. This system of memory management is almost never seen any more, since programs often contain bugs which can cause them to exceed their allocated memory. If
2090-408: A program fails, it may cause memory used by one or more other programs to be affected or overwritten. Malicious programs or viruses may purposefully alter another program's memory, or may affect the operation of the operating system itself. With cooperative memory management, it takes only one misbehaved program to crash the system. Memory protection enables the kernel to limit a process' access to
2200-440: A program tries to access memory that is not accessible memory, but nonetheless has been allocated to it, the kernel is interrupted (see § Memory management ) . This kind of interrupt is typically a page fault . When the kernel detects a page fault it generally adjusts the virtual memory range of the program which triggered it, granting it access to the memory requested. This gives the kernel discretionary power over where
2310-470: A significant amount of CPU time. Direct memory access (DMA) is an architecture feature to allow devices to bypass the CPU and access main memory directly. (Separate from the architecture, a device may perform direct memory access to and from main memory either directly or via a bus.) When a computer user types a key on the keyboard, typically the character appears immediately on the screen. Likewise, when
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#17327725946782420-402: A specific moment in time. Hard real-time systems require exact timing and are common in manufacturing , avionics , military, and other similar uses. With soft real-time systems, the occasional missed event is acceptable; this category often includes audio or multimedia systems, as well as smartphones. In order for hard real-time systems be sufficiently exact in their timing, often they are just
2530-428: A starting point) to make em (the "editor for mortals" ) while acting as a lecturer at Queen Mary College . The em editor was designed for display terminals and was a single-line-at-a-time visual editor. It was one of the first programs on Unix to make heavy use of "raw terminal input mode", in which the running program, rather than the terminal device driver, handled all keystrokes. When Coulouris visited UC Berkeley in
2640-538: A time). Thus BSD Unix, where Joy's vi codebase began, no longer uses it, and the AT&;T-derived Unixes , which in the early days lacked Joy's editor, are the ones that now use and maintain modified versions of his code. Over the years since its creation, vi became the de facto standard Unix editor and a hacker favorite outside of MIT until the rise of Emacs after about 1984. The Single UNIX Specification specifies vi, so every conforming system must have it. vi
2750-643: A unified concept. I think if I were going to go back—I wouldn't go back, but start over again. In 1979, Mary Ann Horton took on responsibility for vi. Horton added support for arrow and function keys, macros, and improved performance by replacing termcap with terminfo . Up to version 3.7 of vi, created in October 1981, UC Berkeley was the development home for vi, but with Bill Joy's departure in early 1982 to join Sun Microsystems , and AT&T's UNIX System V (January 1983) adopting vi, changes to
2860-417: A user moves a mouse , the cursor immediately moves across the screen. Each keystroke and mouse movement generates an interrupt called Interrupt-driven I/O . An interrupt-driven I/O occurs when a process causes an interrupt for every character or word transmitted. Devices such as hard disk drives , solid-state drives , and magnetic tape drives can transfer data at a rate high enough that interrupting
2970-453: A variation of the classic reader/writer problem . The writer receives a pipe from the shell for its output to be sent to the reader's input stream. The command-line syntax is alpha | bravo . alpha will write to the pipe when its computation is ready and then sleep in the wait queue. bravo will then be moved to the ready queue and soon will read from its input stream. The kernel will generate software interrupts to coordinate
3080-418: Is interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers . In the personal computer market, as of September 2024 , Microsoft Windows holds a dominant market share of around 73%. macOS by Apple Inc. is in second place (15%), Linux is in third place (5%), and ChromeOS
3190-562: Is remote direct memory access , which enables each CPU to access memory belonging to other CPUs. Multicomputer operating systems often support remote procedure calls where a CPU can call a procedure on another CPU, or distributed shared memory , in which the operating system uses virtualization to generate shared memory that does not physically exist. A distributed system is a group of distinct, networked computers—each of which might have their own operating system and file system. Unlike multicomputers, they may be dispersed anywhere in
3300-484: Is a change away from the currently running process. Similarly, both hardware and software interrupts execute an interrupt service routine . Software interrupts may be normally occurring events. It is expected that a time slice will occur, so the kernel will have to perform a context switch . A computer program may set a timer to go off after a few seconds in case too much data causes an algorithm to take too long. Software interrupts may be error conditions, such as
3410-479: Is a combination of two independent commands (change and word-motion) together with a transition into and out of insert mode. Text between the cursor position and the end of the word is overwritten by the replacement text. The operation can be repeated at some other location by typing . , the effect being that the word starting at that location will be replaced with the same replacement text. A human–computer interaction textbook notes on its first page that "One of
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3520-433: Is almost intractable. It does a really good job for what it does, but when you're writing programs as you're learning... That's why I stopped working on it. What actually happened was that I was in the process of adding multiwindows to vi when we installed our VAX , which would have been in December of '78. We didn't have any backups and the tape drive broke. I continued to work even without being able to do backups. And then
3630-612: Is described by (and thus standardized by) the Single Unix Specification and POSIX . The original code for vi was written by Bill Joy in 1976 as the visual mode for the ex line editor that Joy had written with Chuck Haley. Joy's ex 1.1 was released as part of the first Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix release in March 1978. It was not until version 2.0 of ex, released as part of Second BSD in May 1979 that
3740-422: Is difficult to define, but has been called "the layer of software that manages a computer's resources for its users and their applications ". Operating systems include the software that is always running, called a kernel —but can include other software as well. The two other types of programs that can run on a computer are system programs —which are associated with the operating system, but may not be part of
3850-896: Is in fourth place (2%). In the mobile sector (including smartphones and tablets ), as of September 2023 , Android's share is 68.92%, followed by Apple's iOS and iPadOS with 30.42%, and other operating systems with .66%. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors. Other specialized classes of operating systems (special-purpose operating systems), such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. Security-focused operating systems also exist. Some operating systems have low system requirements (e.g. light-weight Linux distribution ). Others may have higher system requirements. Some operating systems require installation or may come pre-installed with purchased computers ( OEM -installation), whereas others may run directly from media (i.e. live CD ) or flash memory (i.e. USB stick). An operating system
3960-526: Is much more suited to a research environment, which requires a faster file system, better virtual memory handling, and a larger variety of programming languages . Berkeley's Unix was the first Unix to include libraries supporting the Internet Protocol stacks: Berkeley sockets . A Unix implementation of IP's predecessor, the ARPAnet's NCP , with FTP and Telnet clients, had been produced at
4070-443: Is only a single application running, at least conceptually, so there is no need to prevent interference between applications) and OS services are accessed via simple library calls (potentially inlining them based on compiler thresholds), without the usual overhead of context switches , in a way similarly to embedded and real-time OSes. Note that this overhead is not negligible: to the direct cost of mode switching it's necessary to add
4180-534: Is still widely used by users of the Unix family of operating systems. About half the respondents in a 1991 USENET poll preferred vi. In 1999, Tim O'Reilly , founder of the eponymous computer book publishing company, stated that his company sold more copies of its vi book than its Emacs book. vi is a modal editor: it operates in either insert mode (where typed text becomes part of the document) or command mode (where keystrokes are interpreted as commands that control
4290-499: Is supported by most UNIX systems. MINIX was a stripped-down version of UNIX, developed in 1987 for educational uses, that inspired the commercially available, free software Linux . Since 2008, MINIX is used in controllers of most Intel microchips , while Linux is widespread in data centers and Android smartphones. The invention of large scale integration enabled the production of personal computers (initially called microcomputers ) from around 1980. For around five years,
4400-428: Is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, it's backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing. I think multiple levels of undo would be wonderful, too. But fundamentally, vi is still ed inside. You can't really fool it. It's like one of those pinatas—things that have candy inside but has layer after layer of paper mache on top. It doesn't really have
4510-473: Is that they do not load user-installed software. Consequently, they do not need protection between different applications, enabling simpler designs. Very small operating systems might run in less than 10 kilobytes , and the smallest are for smart cards . Examples include Embedded Linux , QNX , VxWorks , and the extra-small systems RIOT and TinyOS . A real-time operating system is an operating system that guarantees to process events or data by or at
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4620-435: Is the part of the operating system that provides protection between different applications and users. This protection is key to improving reliability by keeping errors isolated to one program, as well as security by limiting the power of malicious software and protecting private data, and ensuring that one program cannot monopolize the computer's resources. Most operating systems have two modes of operation: in user mode ,
4730-472: Is why vi uses them in that way. The ADM-3A had no other cursor keys. Joy explained that the terse, single character commands and the ability to type ahead of the display were a result of the slow 300 baud modem he used when developing the software and that he wanted to be productive when the screen was painting slower than he could think. Joy was responsible for creating the first BSD Unix release in March, 1978, and included ex 1.1 (dated 1 February 1978) in
4840-465: The C shell . Some 75 copies of 2BSD were sent out by Bill Joy. A VAX computer was installed at Berkeley in 1978, but the port of Unix to the VAX architecture, UNIX/32V , did not take advantage of the VAX's virtual memory capabilities. The kernel of 32V was largely rewritten to include Berkeley graduate student Özalp Babaoğlu 's virtual memory implementation, and a complete operating system including
4950-542: The CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) was the most popular operating system for microcomputers. Later, IBM bought the DOS (Disk Operating System) from Microsoft . After modifications requested by IBM, the resulting system was called MS-DOS (MicroSoft Disk Operating System) and was widely used on IBM microcomputers. Later versions increased their sophistication, in part by borrowing features from UNIX. Apple 's Macintosh
5060-504: The INT assembly language instruction is available. The syntax is INT X , where X is the offset number (in hexadecimal format) to the interrupt vector table . To generate software interrupts in Unix-like operating systems, the kill(pid,signum) system call will send a signal to another process. pid is the process identifier of the receiving process. signum is
5170-491: The University of Illinois in 1975, and was available at Berkeley. However, the memory scarcity on the PDP-11 forced a complicated design and performance problems. By integrating sockets with the Unix operating system's file descriptors , it became almost as easy to read and write data across a network as it was to access a disk. The AT&T laboratory eventually released their own STREAMS library, which incorporated much of
5280-420: The transistor in the mid-1950s, mainframes began to be built. These still needed professional operators who manually do what a modern operating system would do, such as scheduling programs to run, but mainframes still had rudimentary operating systems such as Fortran Monitor System (FMS) and IBSYS . In the 1960s, IBM introduced the first series of intercompatible computers ( System/360 ). All of them ran
5390-543: The "standard Unix." However, he described BSD as more popular among university and government computer centers, due to its advanced features and performance: Most university and government computer centers that use UNIX use Berkeley UNIX, rather than System V. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the two most significant are that Berkeley UNIX provides networking capabilities that until recently (Release 3.0) were completely unavailable in System V, and that Berkeley UNIX
5500-437: The 1990s by UNIX SVR4 and OSF/1 . Later releases of BSD provided the basis for several open-source operating systems including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Darwin and TrueOS . These, in turn, have been used by proprietary operating systems, including Apple 's macOS and iOS , which derived from them and Microsoft Windows (since at least 2000 and XP ), which used (at least) part of its TCP/IP code, which
5610-532: The 3.7 release, but with added features such as adjustable key mappings, encryption, and wide character support. In 1983, vi was one of several UNIX tools available for Charles River Data Systems' UNOS operating system under Bell Laboratories license. While commercial vendors could work with Bill Joy's codebase, many people could not. Because Joy had begun with Ken Thompson 's ed editor, ex and vi were derivative works and could not be distributed except to people who had an AT&T source license. Those wanting
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#17327725946785720-643: The 4.4-Lite2 codebase, they too switched over to Bostic's nvi, which they continue to use today. Despite the existence of vi clones with enhanced feature sets, sometime before June 2000, Gunnar Ritter ported Joy's vi codebase (taken from 2.11BSD, February 1992) to modern Unix-based operating systems, such as Linux and FreeBSD. Initially, his work was technically illegal to distribute without an AT&T source license, but, in January 2002, those licensing rules were relaxed, allowing legal distribution as an open-source project. Ritter continued to make small enhancements to
5830-497: The 9th Edition, which incorporated source code and improvements from 4.3BSD. The result was that these later versions of Research Unix were closer to BSD than they were to System V. In a Usenet posting from 2000, Dennis Ritchie described this relationship between BSD and Research Unix: Research Unix 8th Edition started from (I think) BSD 4.1c, but with enormous amounts scooped out and replaced by our own stuff. This continued with 9th and 10th. The ordinary user command-set was, I guess,
5940-576: The AT&;T code. Within eighteen months, all of the AT&T utilities had been replaced, and it was determined that only a few AT&T files remained in the kernel. These files were removed, and the result was the June 1991 release of Networking Release 2 (Net/2), a nearly complete operating system that was freely distributable. Net/2 was the basis for two separate ports of BSD to the Intel 80386 architecture:
6050-410: The CPU for every byte or word transferred, and having the CPU transfer the byte or word between the device and memory, would require too much CPU time. Data is, instead, transferred between the device and memory independently of the CPU by hardware such as a channel or a direct memory access controller; an interrupt is delivered only when all the data is transferred. If a computer program executes
6160-474: The CPU to re-enter supervisor mode , placing the kernel in charge. This is called a segmentation violation or Seg-V for short, and since it is both difficult to assign a meaningful result to such an operation, and because it is usually a sign of a misbehaving program, the kernel generally resorts to terminating the offending program, and reports the error. Windows versions 3.1 through ME had some level of memory protection, but programs could easily circumvent
6270-659: The CSRG was dissolved and development of BSD at Berkeley ceased. Since then, several variants based directly or indirectly on 4.4BSD-Lite (such as FreeBSD , NetBSD , OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD ) have been maintained. The permissive nature of the BSD license has allowed many other operating systems, both open-source and proprietary, to incorporate BSD source code. For example, Microsoft Windows used BSD code in its implementation of TCP/IP and bundles recompiled versions of BSD's command-line networking tools since Windows 2000 . Darwin ,
6380-545: The System V copyright and the Unix trademark. The USL v. BSDi lawsuit was filed in 1992 and led to an injunction on the distribution of Net/2 until the validity of USL's copyright claims on the source could be determined. The lawsuit slowed development of the free-software descendants of BSD for nearly two years while their legal status was in question, and as a result systems based on the Linux kernel , which did not have such legal ambiguity, gained greater support. The lawsuit
6490-538: The application program, which then interacts with the user and with hardware devices. However, in some systems an application can request that the operating system execute another application within the same process, either as a subroutine or in a separate thread, e.g., the LINK and ATTACH facilities of OS/360 and successors . An interrupt (also known as an abort , exception , fault , signal , or trap ) provides an efficient way for most operating systems to react to
6600-410: The basis for Apple's macOS and iOS , is based on 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD. Various commercial Unix operating systems, such as Solaris , also incorporate BSD code. Starting with the 8th Edition, versions of Research Unix at Bell Labs had a close relationship to BSD. This began when 4.1cBSD for the VAX was used as the basis for Research Unix 8th Edition. This continued in subsequent versions, such as
6710-453: The computer's memory. Various methods of memory protection exist, including memory segmentation and paging . All methods require some level of hardware support (such as the 80286 MMU), which does not exist in all computers. In both segmentation and paging, certain protected mode registers specify to the CPU what memory address it should allow a running program to access. Attempts to access other addresses trigger an interrupt, which causes
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#17327725946786820-412: The core of the operating system. Several operating systems are based on BSD, including FreeBSD , OpenBSD , NetBSD , MidnightBSD , MirOS BSD , GhostBSD , Darwin and DragonFly BSD . Both NetBSD and FreeBSD were created in 1993. They were initially derived from 386BSD (also known as "Jolix"), and merged the 4.4BSD-Lite source code in 1994. OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD in 1995, and DragonFly BSD
6930-539: The day, sometimes during the night). A larger PDP-11/70 was installed at Berkeley the following year, using money from the Ingres database project. BSD began life as a variant of Unix that programmers at the University of California at Berkeley, initially led by Bill Joy , began developing in the late 1970s. It included extra features, which were intertwined with code owned by AT&T. In 1975, Ken Thompson took
7040-471: The details of how interrupt service routines behave vary from operating system to operating system. However, several interrupt functions are common. The architecture and operating system must: A software interrupt is a message to a process that an event has occurred. This contrasts with a hardware interrupt — which is a message to the central processing unit (CPU) that an event has occurred. Software interrupts are similar to hardware interrupts — there
7150-569: The distribution, thereby exposing his editor to an audience beyond UC Berkeley . From that release of BSD Unix onward, the only editors that came with the Unix system were ed and ex. In a 1984 interview, Joy attributed much of the success of vi to the fact that it was bundled for free, whereas other editors, such as Emacs , could cost hundreds of dollars. Eventually it was observed that most ex users were spending all their time in visual mode, and thus in ex 2.0 (released as part of Second Berkeley Software Distribution in May, 1979), Joy created vi as
7260-421: The edit session). For example, typing i while in command mode switches the editor to insert mode, but typing i again at this point places an "i" character in the document. From insert mode, pressing ESC switches the editor back to command mode. A perceived advantage of vi's separation of text entry and command modes is that both text editing and command operations can be performed without requiring
7370-405: The editor was installed under the name "vi" (which took users straight into ex's visual mode), and the name by which it is known today. Some current implementations of vi can trace their source code ancestry to Bill Joy; others are completely new, largely compatible reimplementations. The name "vi" is derived from the shortest unambiguous abbreviation for the ex command visual , which switches
7480-408: The editor, which he did June through October 1977 adding a full-screen visual mode to ex —which came to be vi. vi and ex share their code; vi is the ex binary launching with the capability to render the text being edited onto a computer terminal —it is ex's visual mode. The name vi comes from the abbreviated ex command ( vi ) to enter the visual mode from within it. The longform command to do
7590-422: The environment. Interrupts cause the central processing unit (CPU) to have a control flow change away from the currently running program to an interrupt handler , also known as an interrupt service routine (ISR). An interrupt service routine may cause the central processing unit (CPU) to have a context switch . The details of how a computer processes an interrupt vary from architecture to architecture, and
7700-457: The ex line editor to its full-screen mode. The name is pronounced / ˌ v iː ˈ aɪ / (the English letters v and i ). In addition to various non– free software variants of vi distributed with proprietary implementations of Unix, vi was opensourced with OpenSolaris , and several free and open source software vi clones exist. A 2009 survey of Linux Journal readers found that vi
7810-458: The free 386BSD by William and Lynne Jolitz , and the proprietary BSD/386 (later renamed BSD/OS) by Berkeley Software Design (BSDi). 386BSD itself was short-lived, but became the initial code base of the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects that were started shortly thereafter. BSDi soon found itself in legal trouble with AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) subsidiary, then the owners of
7920-543: The full version of vi was no longer able to fit in the memory of a PDP-11; the editor would be also too big to run on PC/IX for the IBM PC in 1984. Joy continued to be lead developer for vi until version 2.7 in June 1979, and made occasional contributions to vi's development until at least version 3.5 in August 1980. In discussing the origins of vi and why he discontinued development, Joy said: I wish we hadn't used all
8030-516: The growth of the Internet. Until then, all versions of BSD used proprietary AT&T Unix code, and were therefore subject to an AT&T software license. Source code licenses had become very expensive and several outside parties had expressed interest in a separate release of the networking code, which had been developed entirely outside AT&T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement. This led to Networking Release 1 ( Net/1 ), which
8140-410: The hardware checks that the software is only executing legal instructions, whereas the kernel has unrestricted powers and is not subject to these checks. The kernel also manages memory for other processes and controls access to input/output devices. The operating system provides an interface between an application program and the computer hardware, so that an application program can interact with
8250-493: The hardware only by obeying rules and procedures programmed into the operating system. The operating system is also a set of services which simplify development and execution of application programs. Executing an application program typically involves the creation of a process by the operating system kernel , which assigns memory space and other resources, establishes a priority for the process in multi-tasking systems, loads program binary code into memory, and initiates execution of
8360-473: The ideas for the screen editing mode were stolen from a Bravo manual I surreptitiously looked at and copied. Dot is really the double-escape from Bravo, the redo command. Most of the stuff was stolen. There were some things stolen from ed —we got a manual page for the Toronto version of ed, which I think Rob Pike had something to do with. We took some of the regular expression extensions out of that. Joy used
8470-418: The indirect pollution of important processor structures (like CPU caches , the instruction pipeline , and so on) which affects both user-mode and kernel-mode performance. The first computers in the late 1940s and 1950s were directly programmed either with plugboards or with machine code inputted on media such as punch cards , without programming languages or operating systems. After the introduction of
8580-404: The interrupt request, the operating system will: When the writing process has its time slice expired, the operating system will: With the program counter now reset, the interrupted process will resume its time slice. Among other things, a multiprogramming operating system kernel must be responsible for managing all system memory which is currently in use by the programs. This ensures that
8690-431: The kernel—and applications—all other software. There are three main purposes that an operating system fulfills: With multiprocessors multiple CPUs share memory. A multicomputer or cluster computer has multiple CPUs, each of which has its own memory . Multicomputers were developed because large multiprocessors are difficult to engineer and prohibitively expensive; they are universal in cloud computing because of
8800-401: The keys on the keyboard. I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode -based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it's pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS , though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me. I also wasn't very good at optimizing code when I wrote vi. I think the redisplay module of the editor
8910-400: The memory allocated to a different one. Around the same time, teleprinters began to be used as terminals so multiple users could access the computer simultaneously. The operating system MULTICS was intended to allow hundreds of users to access a large computer. Despite its limited adoption, it can be considered the precursor to cloud computing . The UNIX operating system originated as
9020-408: The need to use it. A general protection fault would be produced, indicating a segmentation violation had occurred; however, the system would often crash anyway. The use of virtual memory addressing (such as paging or segmentation) means that the kernel can choose what memory each program may use at any given time, allowing the operating system to use the same memory locations for multiple tasks. If
9130-499: The new kernel, ports of the 2BSD utilities to the VAX, and the utilities from 32V was released as 3BSD at the end of 1979. 3BSD was also alternatively called Virtual VAX/UNIX or VMUNIX (for Virtual Memory Unix), and BSD kernel images were normally called /vmunix until 4.4BSD. After 4.3BSD was released in June 1986, it was determined that BSD would move away from the aging VAX platform. The Power 6/32 platform (codenamed "Tahoe") developed by Computer Consoles Inc. seemed promising at
9240-408: The open-source Android operating system (introduced 2008), with a Linux kernel and a C library ( Bionic ) partially based on BSD code, became most popular. The components of an operating system are designed to ensure that various parts of a computer function cohesively. With the de facto obsoletion of DOS , all user software must interact with the operating system to access hardware. The kernel
9350-421: The piping. Signals may be classified into 7 categories. The categories are: Input/output (I/O) devices are slower than the CPU. Therefore, it would slow down the computer if the CPU had to wait for each I/O to finish. Instead, a computer may implement interrupts for I/O completion, avoiding the need for polling or busy waiting. Some computers require an interrupt for each character or word, costing
9460-501: The programmer or the user with the perception that there is a much larger amount of RAM in the computer than is really there. Vi (text editor) vi (pronounced as distinct letters, / ˌ v iː ˈ aɪ / ) is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs,
9570-449: The property that most ordinary keys are connected to some kind of command for positioning, altering text, searching and so forth, either singly or in key combinations. Many commands can be touch typed without the use of Ctrl or Alt . Other types of editors generally require the user to move their hands from the home row when touch typing : For instance, in vi, replacing a word is c w replacement text Escape , which
9680-406: The removal of the user's hands from the home row . As non-modal editors usually have to reserve all keys with letters and symbols for the printing of characters, any special commands for actions other than adding text to the buffer must be assigned to keys that do not produce characters, such as function keys, or combinations of modifier keys such as Ctrl , and Alt with regular keys. Vi has
9790-474: The request of computer science professor Bob Fabry who had been on the program committee for the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles where Unix was first presented. A PDP-11/45 was bought to run the system, but for budgetary reasons, this machine was shared with the mathematics and statistics groups at Berkeley, who used RSTS , so that Unix only ran on the machine eight hours per day (sometimes during
9900-413: The same functionality in a software stack with a different architecture, but the wide distribution of the existing sockets library reduced the impact of the new API . Early versions of BSD were used to form Sun Microsystems ' SunOS , founding the first wave of popular Unix workstations. Some BSD operating systems can run native software of several other operating systems on the same architecture , using
10010-418: The same operating system— OS/360 —which consisted of millions of lines of assembly language that had thousands of bugs . The OS/360 also was the first popular operating system to support multiprogramming , such that the CPU could be put to use on one job while another was waiting on input/output (I/O). Holding multiple jobs in memory necessitated memory partitioning and safeguards against one job accessing
10120-467: The same was visual , and the name vi is explained as a contraction of visual in later literature. vi is also the shell command to launch ex/vi in the visual mode directly, from within a shell . According to Joy, many of the ideas in this visual mode were taken from Bravo —the bimodal text editor developed at Xerox PARC for the Alto . In an interview about vi's origins, Joy said: A lot of
10230-400: The signal number (in mnemonic format) to be sent. (The abrasive name of kill was chosen because early implementations only terminated the process.) In Unix-like operating systems, signals inform processes of the occurrence of asynchronous events. To communicate asynchronously, interrupts are required. One reason a process needs to asynchronously communicate to another process solves
10340-400: The size of the machine needed. The different CPUs often need to send and receive messages to each other; to ensure good performance, the operating systems for these machines need to minimize this copying of packets . Newer systems are often multiqueue —separating groups of users into separate queues —to reduce the need for packet copying and support more concurrent users. Another technique
10450-436: The source code got scrunched and I didn't have a complete listing. I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up. After that, I went back to the previous version and just documented the code, finished the manual and closed it off. If that scrunch had not happened, vi would have multiple windows, and I might have put in some programmability—but I don't know. The fundamental problem with vi
10560-496: The summer of 1976, he brought a DECtape containing em, and showed the editor to various people. Some people considered this new kind of editor to be a potential resource hog, but others, including Bill Joy , were impressed. Inspired by em, and by their own tweaks to ed, Bill Joy and Chuck Haley, both graduate students at UC Berkeley , took code from em to make en, and then "extended" en to create ex version 0.1. After Haley's departure, Bruce Englar encouraged Joy to redesign
10670-442: The system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time , mass storage , peripherals, and other resources. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation , the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or
10780-540: The time, but was abandoned by its developers shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, the 4.3BSD-Tahoe port (June 1988) proved valuable, as it led to a separation of machine-dependent and machine-independent code in BSD which would improve the system's future portability. In addition to portability, the CSRG worked on an implementation of the OSI network protocol stack, improvements to the kernel virtual memory system and (with Van Jacobson of LBL ) new TCP/IP algorithms to accommodate
10890-413: The vi codebase happened more slowly and in a more dispersed and mutually incompatible way. At UC Berkeley, changes were made but the version number was never updated beyond 3.7. Commercial Unix vendors, such as Sun, HP , DEC , and IBM each received copies of the vi source, and their operating systems, Solaris , HP-UX , Tru64 UNIX , and AIX , continued to maintain versions of vi directly descended from
11000-530: The vi codebase similar to those done by commercial Unix vendors still using Joy's codebase, including changes required by the POSIX.2 standard for vi. His work is available as Traditional Vi. But although Joy's vi was now once again available for BSD Unix, it arrived after the various BSD flavors had committed themselves to nvi, which provided a number of enhancements over traditional vi, and dropped some of its legacy features (such as open mode for editing one line at
11110-416: The void left by removing vi, their 1992 386BSD distribution adopted Elvis. 386BSD's descendants, FreeBSD and NetBSD , followed suit. But at UC Berkeley, Keith Bostic wanted a "bug for bug compatible" replacement for Joy's vi for 4.4BSD-Lite. Using Kirkendall's Elvis (version 1.8) as a starting point, Bostic created nvi , releasing it in the northern spring of 1994. When FreeBSD and NetBSD resynchronized
11220-473: The world. Middleware , an additional software layer between the operating system and applications, is often used to improve consistency. Although it functions similarly to an operating system, it is not a true operating system. Embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems , whether they are internet of things objects or not connected to a network. Embedded systems include many household appliances. The distinguishing factor
11330-557: Was forked from FreeBSD in 2003. BSD was also used as the basis for several proprietary versions of Unix, such as Sun 's SunOS , Sequent 's DYNIX , NeXT 's NeXTSTEP , DEC 's Ultrix and OSF/1 AXP (now Tru64 UNIX ). NeXTSTEP later became the foundation for Apple Inc. 's macOS . Operating system An operating system ( OS ) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs . Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of
11440-446: Was initially called Berkeley Unix because it was based on the source code of the original Unix developed at Bell Labs . In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in the form of proprietary Unix variants such as DEC Ultrix and Sun Microsystems SunOS due to its permissive licensing and familiarity to many technology company founders and engineers. These proprietary BSD derivatives were largely superseded in
11550-473: Was legal. Code from FreeBSD was also used to create the operating systems for the PlayStation 5 , PlayStation 4 , PlayStation 3 , PlayStation Vita , and Nintendo Switch . The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify and extend Unix. The operating system arrived at Berkeley in 1974, at
11660-400: Was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the BSD license . It was released in June 1989. After Net/1, BSD developer Keith Bostic proposed that more non-AT&T sections of the BSD system be released under the same license as Net/1. To this end, he started a project to reimplement most of the standard Unix utilities without using
11770-411: Was released on March 9, 1978. 1BSD was an add-on to Version 6 Unix rather than a complete operating system in its own right. Some thirty copies were sent out. The second Berkeley Software Distribution (2BSD), released in May 1979, included updated versions of the 1BSD software as well as two new programs by Joy that persist on Unix systems to this day: the vi text editor (a visual version of ex ) and
11880-558: Was settled in January 1994, largely in Berkeley's favor. Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only three had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices. A further condition of the settlement was that USL would not file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the Berkeley-owned code in the upcoming 4.4BSD release. The final release from Berkeley was 1995's 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2 , after which
11990-406: Was the first popular computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI proved much more user friendly than the text-only command-line interface earlier operating systems had used. Following the success of Macintosh, MS-DOS was updated with a GUI overlay called Windows . Windows later was rewritten as a stand-alone operating system, borrowing so many features from another ( VAX VMS ) that
12100-600: Was the most widely used text editor among respondents, beating gedit , the second most widely used editor, by nearly a factor of two (36% to 19%). vi was derived from a sequence of UNIX command line editors, starting with ed , which was a line editor designed to work well on teleprinters , rather than display terminals . Within AT&T Corporation , where ed originated, people seemed to be happy with an editor as basic and unfriendly as ed, George Coulouris recalls: [...] for many years, they had no suitable terminals. They carried on with TTYs and other printing terminals for
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