[thvv]

".rc" is derived from RUNCOM. Bell Labs engineers were part of the Multics design team in the 60s and used CTSS. Bob Sobecki (BTL), Glenda Schroeder (MIT), and Karolyn Martin (MIT) wrote early design documents for the Multics shell, in about 1966.

The Multics team suggested many features and changes to the Multics command language as the system design evolved. Prototype Multics had slow performance, and the shell implementation was reworked and simplified several times. For a while we implemented a program called the "mini shell" that lacked the fancy features but was much faster: it passed complex commands to the "full shell" if necessary. Eventually, PL/I improved and we learned to avoid slow constructs, and had one shell program.

The Multics design document for the shell is https://multicians.org/mspm-bx-1-00.html (5/29/68). The Multics Glossary entry for the command language is https://multicians.org/mgc.html#commandlanguage . Source for a 1988 version of the command processor is at MIT: http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/ldd/system...