On this occasion we speak to Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell, or sh. In the early 1970s Bourne was at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, England working on a compiler for ALGOL68 as part of his PhD work in dynamical astronomy. This work paved the way for him to travel to IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in New York in 1973, in part to undertake research into compilers. Through this work, and a series of connections and circumstance, Bourne got to know people at Bell Labs who then offered him a job in the Unix group in 1975. It was during this time Bourne developed sh.

What prompted the creation of the Bourne shell?

The original shell wasn't really a language; it was a recording -- a way of executing a linear sequence of commands from a file, the only control flow primitive being goto a label. These limitations to the original shell that Ken Thompson wrote were significant. You couldn't, for example, easily use a command script as a filter because the command file itself was the standard input. And in a filter the standard input is what you inherit from your parent process, not the command file.

The original shell was simple but as people started to use Unix for application development and scripting, it was too limited. It didn't have variables, it didn't have control flow, and it had very inadequate quoting capabilities.

My own interest, before I went to Bell Labs, was in programming language design and compilers. At Cambridge I had worked on the language ALGOL68 with Mike Guy. A small group of us wrote a compiler for ALGOL68 that we called ALGOL68C. We also made some additions to the language to make it more usable. As an aside we boot strapped the compiler so that it was also written in ALGOL68C.