28 Nov
2017
28 Nov
'17
7:19 p.m.
Multics had some kind of `attach' and
`detach' of I/O streams, well
known to Ossanna, so perhaps dup(2), and a Thompson-shell syntax to go
with it meant `>' was earmarked early on.
According to "The Evolution of the Unix Timesharing System", full path names
arrived later than I/O redirection, so by they time they needed a separator,
'>' and '<' were gone. '/' also has the advantage of
being a non-shift
character!
Noel
PS: Re-reading that, I see that early Unix did not have an exec() call (as I
was just discussing); it was done in user mode, with normal read and write
calls.