Papers from the Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.

The article reports on the fourth symposium of the Association for Computing Machinery, on Operating Systems Principles. For the symposium, over 60 papers were submitted to the program committee in response to a call for papers. From this set, 21 papers were selected for presentation in five formal sessions. Two sessions on the first day of the symposium contained papers describing principles relevant to operating system design and measurement, as well as papers describing complete operating systems. An important focal point of the symposium was the topic of computer security and protection. The banquet speaker, professor Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University, also emphasized protection. The need to understand the technical aspects of security is particularly urgent in view of the current national attention being given to the social implications of computerized data banks and the rights of citizens. The symposium was co-hosted by the Computer Science Department of Yale University and the Computer Sciences Department of IBM Research Center.