Input Output

2009-05-23

trap

n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program.
vi. To cause a trap. "These instructions trap to the monitor." Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. "The monitor traps all input/output instructions."
This term is associated with assembler programming (interrupt or exception is more common among {HLL} programmers) and appears to be fading into history among programmers as the role of assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and systems hackers (see {system}, sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts).

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2009-05-20

Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early (1963) experiment in the design of interactive timesharing, operating systems, ancestral to {Multics}, {Unix}, and {ITS}. The name {ITS} (Incompatible Time-sharing System) was a hack on CTSS, meant both as a joke and to express some basic differences in philosophy about the way I/O services should be presented to user programs. See {timesharing}.

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