"staatsvertrag zwischen österreich, preußen, baiern (sic!) und sachsen vom 25. juli 1850, über die bildung des deutsch-österreichischen telegraphenvereines":

j.p.buzen (honeywell) and u.o.gagliardi (harvard), the evolution of virtual machine architecture, 1973

Essentially, third generation architectures created two distinct modes of system operation (privileged/non-privi- leged, master/slave, system/user, etc.)

the discussion about virtualization started in the early 1960s somewhere in england ... at least in the case of computing.

hypervisor (aka vmm): because It is conceptually one level higher than a supervisor | en.wikipedia

the wording supervisor seems to rely on a convention comp. architects agreed on:

the processor is a conventional one with two modes of operation, supervisor and user. in supervisor mode the complete instruction repertoire is available to the precessor. In user mode, it is not | gerald j. popek, robert p. goldberg, formal requirements for virtualizable third generation architecture, casm, Vol17/7, 1974

an interesting acm panel discussion which happened on august 30, 1967 with:

Issac Auerbach, Bruce Gilchrist, Sam Alexander, Bruce Schoonover, George Stibitz, Richard Bloch, John Mauchly, Herman Goldstine, Edward Cannon, Maurice Wilkes, Grace Hopper, Jay Forrester, Arnold A. Cohen, E.G. Andrews, Ed Berkley, Leslie Simon, Donald Eckdhal, Herb Grosch, Henry Polachek, Richard Turner, Jan Rajchman, Jerry Haddard, Betty Holberton, and Arthur Burks.

... Auerbach: I would like to set the ground rules for this discussion this afternoon and give you a little background as to why we are doing what we are you doing. As you are aware, for some years now there has been conversation under way to try to start the writing of the history of the development of the digital computer. In keeping with that, we have the very outstanding services right here in Washington of a group of people who are recording this session on audio tape, on stenotype tape and on video tape. The video tape is through the courtesy of Ampex Corporation and Multimedia Engineering. To accommodate them, we have one minor problem and that is the tapes are only one hour long. So that every hour you are going to get a 90 second stretch so that we can try to record as much of this as possible ... | transcript ComputerHistory1967 (application/pdf, 843 KB) (made in usa)