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I would like to thank my wife, Neelu, and my sons, Sameer and Amit, for enduring lonely evenings and weekends for the past seven years while I was preoccupied with this book. Neelu also helped in typing, editing, and correction.
I am indebted to Digital Equipment Corporation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology for supporting this effort. The seeds of this book were sown during my sabbatical at MIT in 1983-1984. The sabbatical was made possible by the encouragement and support of Linda Wright of DEC and Professor Jerry Saltzer of MIT. In later years, Bill Hawe of DEC and Professor Fernando Corbato of MIT encouraged me to teach the course and refine the class notes that resulted in this book.
A number of my colleagues read drafts and helped improve the readability of the text. Thanks are due to Katherin Winkler, Praduman Jain, Sandy Hsueh, Oliver Ibe, Dick Spencer, Sanjay Mithal, Yun-Cheng Liu, Jeff Dawson, Pete Kaiser, Brad Waters, Rich Pitkin, Vasmi Abidi, Tim Sager, Susan Owicki, Marc Greenwald, Kamesh Gargeya, Barbara Benton, George Cathey, Mark Dufresne, Bill Zahavi, Pete Benoit, Mike Peterson, Eugene Finkelstein, Mike Como, and Karen Dorhamer for their suggestions. Andrea Finger, Janice Wilkins, and Kathy Allen helped with typing and Kathy Colby helped in editing various parts of the book. The help by the staff of John Wiley & Sons is also appreciated. In particular, I enjoyed working with my editor, Diane Cerra, and production editor, Bob Hilbert.
Many of the case studies presented in this book were done by students as course projects at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thanks are due to Kirk Mousley (Case Study 11.1), J. P. Restivo (Case Studies 14.1 and 15.1), Andy Ayers (Case Study 18.1), Steve Hsu and John Wang (Case Study 19.1), Andy Anderson (Example 21.1 and Case Studies 21.1 and 21.3), Henry Wu (Case Study 21.2), and Tomas Wanuga (Case Study 25.1).
The following trademarks have been used in the book. 68000 is a trademark of Motorola, Inc. 8086 is a trademark of Intel Corp. Z80 is a trademark of Zilog, Inc. PDP-11/70 and VAX-11/780 are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corp. TPC Benchmark is a trademark of the Transaction Processing Performance Council. PCjr is a trademark of International Business Machines, Corp. Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. MS-DOS is a trademark of Microsoft Corp. UNIX is a registered trademark of Bell Laboratories.
To my mother, Sulochana Devi
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