Re:
> In either the late 1970's or early 1980's, for very much the same reasons, HP
> changed the names of its processes from "father" and "son" to "parent" and
> "child."

Uh, that was me :)
I also changed "brother" to "sibling".

I made that change circa 1981 when I was writing the Process Management code
for HPE (later to become MPE XL).  I'd long felt that specifying the
sex for a process was a silly idea.  After all, if a process is hung,
we don't say "he's hung", we quite properly say "it's hung".

I'd become aware of the affect some words have on users back in 1970,
when I saw a user break down in tears when her job aborted on a Burroughs
B6500 with the message "death in family".  She'd just had a parent die, so she
was sensitive to that phrase.  (On MCP, as on MPE/iX, when a parent
process terminates, all child proccesses are aborted.)

I don't think Burroughs changed the message ... although I hear they
did change the internal-to-the-OS procedure name "motherforker" to something
else (it had something to do with forking a new process).  They may
have left the GodzillasPhoneNumber variable in, too (the address of another
CPU in a multi-CPU system).

SS



--
Stan Sieler
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