Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980) [pdf]

Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by ModernMech on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @03:50PM (#28922823)

Pilot is cool because it's basically bare metal Mesa. Written in Mesa, runs only Mesa programs, and leverages features of the Mesa language for OS security (e.g. Mesa's capability system).

Other cool projects like this:

- Cedar was both a PL and an OS: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~andre/ics228s2006/swinehartzellwege...

- The Oberon OS and Oberon PL https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon1992.pdf

- A Scheme OS called MrEd: https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/icfp99-ffkf.pdf

You might even throw the JVM and Smalltalk into this category.

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Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by pjmlp on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:42PM (#28923488)

Cedar's link is broken.

This is a good one, https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparcteCedarProgra...

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Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by ModernMech on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:51PM (#28923591)

Thanks!

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Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by nanomonkey on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:12PM (#28923135)

I'm having a hard time finding documents describing Mesa's capability system, although the term capability system has come up repeatedly in conversation, so I'm intrigued as to what this refers to exactly. Any documents that you can point us to? Thanks.

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Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by pmcjones on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @06:21PM (#28924508)

I'm an author of the Pilot paper (and also a participant in the much earlier capability-oriented CAL TSS for the Control Data 6400: https://www.mcjones.org/CalTSS/). Pilot was a long time ago, but as I recall its capabilities were just Mesa records with some "option" bits plus a unique identifier for the file. So a malicious program could easily fabricate one.

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Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by wmf on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:30PM (#28923369)

http://www.cap-lore.com/CapTheory/

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Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by nanomonkey on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:39PM (#28923460)

Thanks!

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Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by mhd on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @05:43PM (#28924159)

There's a quite nifty and recent demonstration of Cedar on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

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Re:Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980)... by rbanffy on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @04:21PM (#28923251)

IIRC, Oberon used to be available from the Mac App Store.

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