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If you want to look at it as ‘fundamentals’, fork only requires the concept of a task, whereas your top-level comment's suggestion also requires (a) secondary s
by kps 6y ago
If you want to look at it as ‘fundamentals’, fork only requires the concept of a task, whereas your top-level comment's suggestion also requires (a) secondary storage, (b) organized into files, (c) that can be named.
(That's not why Unix developed with fork, though.)
- Joker_vD 6y agoThe (b) and (c) are not really needed: early timesharing systems managed to launch processes straight from the punched card decks IIRC. And without (a), what do you even need the second, identical task for? I guess it could be used parallelize crunching the numbers, but that's it; and probably that should perhaps be done from the system operator layer anyway? Like, "launch 5 copies of program on this deck but mark one specific slot in memory different for them, so they would know their ID".