Philosophy of Shells

Using a Command Language as a High-Level Programming Language
John R. Mashey
Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Software Engineering (October 13-15, 1976), pp. 169-176

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The UNIX Command Language
K. Thompson
© K Thompson 1976

Said to have appeared in:
Structured Programming - Infotech State of the Art Report
Nicholson House, Maidenhead, Berkshire, England
Infotech International Ltd. (March 1975), pp. 375-384.

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A Partial Tour Through the UNIX Shell
Geoff Collyer
Usenix Conference Proceedings, Winter 1989

I printed this paper’s pages from a PDF of the whole conference proceedings.

The SHELL: A Global Tool for Calling and Chaining Procedures in the System
Louis Pouzin
April 2, 1965

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Most modern operating systems include a “shell” of one form or another, sometimes text-based, sometimes graphical. The first shell was written by Louis Pouzin. It dates to 1963 or 1964. He even wrote a paper about it.