The UNIX Time-Sharing System (1974)
Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-08-29 digest. Area: Operating Systems. Authors: Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson (Bell Laboratories) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 7, July 1974, pp. 365–375. DOI: 10.1145/361011.361061 Why the paper still matters Most influential systems papers describe something large. This one describes something conspicuously small, and the smallness is the argument. The system it presents ran on a PDP-11/45 with 144K bytes of core, of which the resident kernel occupied roughly 42K — about 16K words of code and data....