2 Jun
2020
2 Jun
'20
11:45 p.m.
The operating systems that I cut my teeth on (OS/360, DOS/360,
VAX/VMS) all had basic I/O system calls that were non-blocking.
Blocking I/O calls were all built on top of that framework. I thus
found it curious that Unix took the opposite tack, and non-blocking
I/O was an afterthought.
So I'm curious as to what the rationale was for Unix to have been
designed with basic I/O being blocking rather than asynchronous.
Especially that non-blocking I/O primitives were the norm for OSes in
those days.
-Paul W.