In the middle 1950s, an operating system was regarded as a control program that scheduled the resources of a computer system and billed users for resource consumption. Since then, as the power of computer mainframes has grown, so have the responsibilities assigned to the operating system. Growth has begotten cynicism: Some people regard an operating system as a large bulk of software that hides otherwise good hardware behind a shield of overhead. 1 The intellectual content of the field of operating systems was recognized in the early 1970s. Virtually every curriculum in computer science and engineering includes a course on operating systems. Texts are numerous. There is a continuing
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