THE

"THE" is the abbreviation of "Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven", the then-name (in ) of the Eindhoven University of Technology, where Dijkstra developed the operating system of that name."THE" is also an acronym for The Hessling Editor, or a completely different program with a different purpose that was called "The Humane".

THE was an early multitasking (but not multi-user) computer operating system developed by Edsger Dijkstra and his team. It was notable because Dijkstra was forced, by limited numbers of developers and poor built-in support for debugging, to use quasi-formal methods and a structured 5-level hierarchical division of the kernel much like MULTICS' later ring-segmentation model; it apparently also introduced the first forms of memory segmentation, freeing programmers from being forced to use actual physical locations on the drum memory.

THE was written in assembly, but incrementally. Level 0 (processor management and allocation) was written before Level 1 (memory management), which itself was written before Level 2 (handling the device driver for the keyboard and such), and so on.

See also

* Protection ring