On Sun, 22 Apr 2018 13:37:27 -0400 Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
available to page itself. it really is just like the
fact that by the
time of the VAX, DEC was not shipping core memories at all (and few 11's
shipped with core either as the thanks to Moore's law, the price of
semiconductor memory had dropped), so calling the main system memory 'core'
was obsolete. Thus, the UNIX term 'core dump' was really meaningless.
[In fact, Magic, the OS for the Tektronix Magnolia Machine has 'mos dump'
files - because I did that].
I have wondered if the word "kernel" got used instead of
"core" for the essential part of an OS because core was
already in use in relation to memory (and with a different
derivation). "kernel" may have been used in this context in
the '60s but I don't really know who used it first.