The original Thompson shell was principally written by Ken Thompson
of Bell Labs.  However, it should be noted that other individuals
at Bell Labs also had a role in its development: Dennis M. Ritchie,
M. D. McIlroy, J. F. Ossanna, and quite likely others as well.

Jeffrey Allen Neitzel is the principal developer and maintainer of
the enhanced, backward-compatible port of the Sixth Edition (V6)
UNIX Thompson shell (and all other software) released as part of
the osh project.

============
Definitions:
	compatibility - backward compatibility

	osh - enhanced port of the Sixth Edition (V6) UNIX Thompson shell

	sh6 - port of the Sixth Edition (V6) UNIX Thompson shell
		(sh6 references implicitly include glob6)
===

Notice that I have released three different implementations of
osh(1) since July 2003.  The origin and primary objectives of
each one are described below.

================================
[osh-030730 through osh-060124]:
	The first implementation was originally authored by Gunnar
	Ritter as osh-020214/osh.c and was then adopted by Jeffrey
	Allen Neitzel.

	Unfortunately, the design of Gunnar's implementation was
	incompatible with the Thompson shell in several respects.
	Thus, it required a lot of workarounds in order to fix the
	design incompatibilities.

	I modified Gunnar's design to separate command-line parsing
	and execution so that the shell could at least be compatible
	in the most basic sense.  The only catch was that word
	splitting was still incompatible.  Thus, this partial
	solution was always destined for eventual replacement.

	Primary objective was compatibility.
===

====================================
[osh-20061230 through osh-20100228]:
	The second implementation was originally authored by Ken
	Thompson as Sixth Edition UNIX /usr/source/s2/sh.c and was
	then ported by Jeffrey Allen Neitzel for personal use in
	January 2004.

	I eventually released it as sh6(1) in osh-060124.  Then,
	after its release, I realized that the design of the original
	shell (see: osh-060124/*6.c) offered a far better starting
	point for making osh(1) truly backward-compatible with the
	Thompson shell.

	Bothered by the fact that osh(1) still had incompatible
	word-splitting behavior, I abandoned the design used in the
	first implementation, adapted sh6.c and glob6.c, copied
	them to osh.c, and began working on it during my free time
	in 2006.  Finally, I released the new implementation of
	osh(1) in osh-20061230.

	Primary objective was compatibility.
===

===================================
[osh-20100430 through osh-current]:
	The third implementation continues with primary objectives
	of compatibility and long-term stability.  Consequently,
	all new features (if/when added) must work in concert
	with primary objectives.  Otherwise, they will not
	be added.
===

I wish to thank the original authors very much for their efforts.
Without their previous work, none of this software or documentation
would exist today.

See the DEDICATIONS file for further info.

Jeffrey Allen Neitzel						2012/06/02

@(#)$Id: bcb06f71559f3f534cb7958cc75d4d9decbe94ce $