Apparently, the original Multics shell (sense 1) was so called because it was a shell (sense 3); it ran user programs not by starting up separate processes, but by dynamically linking the programs into its own code, calling them as subroutines, and then dynamically de-linking them on return.
That was definitely much more enjoyable than I expected!
A bit of history on commonly used terms like “log”, “patch” and “lower case”
I could spent hours browsing through content like this, very nice!
Then you would enjoy the jargon file
Nice article. Can anyone of elders give more information on
shellword from the old times?Source: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/shell.html
Wow, thats a nice gem of a site. Much appreciated.