Glenda Schroeder facts for kids
Glenda Schroeder is an American software engineer who made important contributions to early computer systems. She is known for creating the first command-line user interface called a "shell." She also helped write one of the first research papers about electronic mail systems in 1965, while working at the MIT Computation Center.
Biography
In the early days of computers, special programs called "resident monitors" handled commands. It was hard to change how these commands worked. In 1964, Louis Pouzin, another staff member at the MIT Computation Center, created a tool called RUNCOM. This tool allowed users to run command scripts and change parts of them easily.
Pouzin came up with the word "shell" to describe this new way of using commands, almost like a programming language. He wrote a paper explaining how this idea could work in the Multics operating system.
When Pouzin returned to France in 1965, Glenda Schroeder took over his work. With help from someone at General Electric, she developed the very first Multics shell. This Multics shell was a very important step, as it led to the creation of the Unix shell, which is still used by many computer systems today.
Schroeder also worked with Pat Crisman and Louis Pouzin on an early email system. They called it "MAIL." This system allowed users on the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT to send messages to each other. For example, they could send notifications about file backups.
Each user had a "MAIL BOX" file where their messages were stored. This mailbox could be set to "private," meaning only the owner could read or delete their messages. The first ideas for this email system included:
- CTSS sending messages to users about backed-up files.
- Discussions between people who created CTSS commands.
- Command creators sending messages to the editor of the CTSS manual.
This early service only let users send messages to others on the same computer. The idea of sending messages between different computers came later, developed by Ray Tomlinson in 1971.
