Time and activity in Unix

Decoding Programmes
By Baptiste Mélès
English

This article examines the concept of time in the Unix operating system, showing on the one hand how it differs from that of the machine and, on the other, how it is connected to Unix’s distinctive concept of action, the process. We begin with a discussion of the temporality used by the synchronous machines defined by John von Neumann in the “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” (1945), before analyzing in detail the source code of the main function and of the clock driver of Version 6 of Unix (1975). He shows that, in computer science, different levels of activity correspond to as many different scales of temporality.

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