Glossary of Multics acronyms and terms. Entries by Tom Van Vleck ([THVV]) unless noted.
Index| A| B| C| D| E| F| G| H| I| J| K| L| M| N| O| P| Q| R| S| T| U| V| W| X| Y| Z|
- wakeup
- See IPC.
- WARMAPS
- Wartime Manpower Programing System. US DoD application that ran on the AFDSC site. A procedure, structure, and database for computing, compiling, projecting, and portraying the time-phased wartime manpower requirements, demand, and supply of the military components. Designed and implemented by General Research Corporation starting in 1978.
- WATCHWORD
- Authentication device that looked like a pocket calculator, used to generate better authentication than passwords. The DOCKMASTER site implemented one-time passwords using it in the early 1990s.
- WHIRLWIND
- Early computer at MIT, begun during WW II and operational about 1950. Built by the MIT Electronics Systems Laboratory. A pioneering machine that was one of the first to use Jay Forrester's core memory. A prototype for air defense systems.
- wired
- [BSG] Code or data that is fixed in physical memory, either by virtue of being in unpaged segments (individual segments can either be paged or contiguous in memory), or in segments whose pages are marked as being non-removable. Today called "page-locked". Code and data is wired if it must be either be run or referenced at an equal or lower conceptual level than the I/O and page management routines doing the paging, is data actually being transferred to and from I/O controllers, or is code which must compete with such code for resources and its data. In practice, this means page control, the scheduler, the disk routines, low-level I/O control routines, interrupt handlers and vectors, page tables, and that subset of the PL/I runtime (see pl1_operators_) that is used by any of those aforementioned that are written in PL/I. Except as an experiment, code or data was never wired for performance reasons.
- WORDPRO
- Marketing package for compose plus Emacs, plus Speedtype, plus a simplified shell. Originally proposed by Bill Silver in the mid 1970s. Documented in Honeywell manual AZ98. (also see PUMA)
- working directory
- Directory used as the implicit prefix of relative path names. See search rules.
- working set
- Set of pages, at any time, required in core for a program to make reasonable progress without thrashing. Defined by Peter Denning in his 1968 CACM article "The working set model for program behavior."
- write bracket
- [BSG] Range of rings that can write a given segment. If the segment's ring brackets are 1, 5, 5, the write bracket is rings 0 to 1. Also sometimes used to refer to that upper inclusive limit itself.