[cap-talk] DVH and PDP-1 Supervisor

[Bill Tulloh]

Here are some online references I've found on the early history of capabilities.

On 7/30/06, Charles Landau <clandau at macslab.com> wrote:

> The Dennis and Van Horn paper was published in 1966 which was a year
> before I arrived at MIT, so I don't have direct knowledge of the
> circumstances of the paper. If I'm not mistaken Van Horn was a
> graduate student and the paper was related to his thesis. I don't
> know what happened to Van Horn after that.

Here is a link to an earlier (1964) "memo" by Van Horn where he uses
the term capabilities. The earliest use of the term I've seen.

http://www.csg.csail.mit.edu/pubs/memos/Memo-9/Memo-9.pdf

Here is a link to Van Horn's thesis:
http://www.lcs.mit.edu/publications/specpub.php?id=602

Here are some comments from Peter Denning on the collaboration between
Van Horn and Dennis (see section on Object Oriented Virtual Memory
starting at page 9). Denning was Van Horn's office mate and fellow
grad student at the time.

http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/PUBS/bvm.pdf.

> By 1967 the capability architecture on the MIT PDP-1 was already
> largely implemented, and Ackerman was a major contributor.
> (Reference:  William B. Ackerman , William W. Plummer, An
> implementation of a multiprocessing computer system, Proceedings of
> the ACM symposium on Operating System Principles, p.5.1-5.10, January
> 1967). I don't recall ever seeing Dennis involved in the actual
> implementation.

Here is a link to an online version of the Ackerman and Plummer paper:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/rle_pdp1/MIT_TSS_Oct67.pdf


Bill