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 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.

Notice that I have developed two different implementations of osh(1)
since July 2003.  The origin of each one is 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.
===

===================================
[osh-20061230 through osh-current]:
	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.
===

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.

Jeffrey Allen Neitzel						2010/04/30

@(#)$Id: 628ef831c68dfdc514f6dc73ab9127f19c71b75a $
