Xerox Business Systems
The Pilot operating system provides a single-user, single-language environment for higher level software on a powerful personal computer. Its features include virtual memory, a large "flat" file system, streams, network communication facilities, and concurrent programming support. Pilot thus provides rather more powerful facilities than are normally associated with personal computers. The exact facilities provided display interesting similarities to and differences from corresponding facilities provided in large multi-user systems. Pilot is implemented entirely in Mesa, a high-level system programming language. The modularization of the implementation displays some interesting aspects in terms of both the static structure and dynamic interactions of the various components.
Key Words and Phrases: personal computer, operating system, high-level language, virtual memory, file, process, network, modular programming, system structure
CR Categories: 4.32, 4.35, 4.42, 6.20
This is a digitized copy derived from an ACM copyrighted work. ACM did not prepare this copy and does not guarantee that is it an accurate copy of the author's original work. The original appeared in the February 1980 edition of Communications of the ACM (Volume 23, Number 2, pages 81-92).
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A version of this paper was presented at the 7th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Pacific Grove, Calif., Dec. 10-12, 1979
Authors' address: Xerox Business Systems, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94304.
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