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17:54:48
frodef
My historical understanding of unix (multics) processes was perhaps more that it was a way to share computers between users, i.e. each process simulating basically an isolated, separate computer.
17:56:00
frodef
(The more recent VM emphasis being basically the same pattern repeated with yet another level of indirection.)
19:04:17
jcowan
The earliest Unix had no concept of users, being in fact a single-user machine. The point was to provide a functional meta-language that represented stateless computation between arbitrary black boxes.
19:05:04
jcowan
The black boxes could compute with effects and generally did, but no effect could spread beyond a certain scope, short of kill().
19:06:28
jcowan
Multics did indeed have one process per user as a rule, which is where the shell got its name; it was literally a shell that dynamically linked the code you wanted to run into itself, all programs being represented by libraries with a fixed interface.
2:54:58
beach
"It is named a shell because it is the outermost layer around the operating system kernel."