From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:59:37 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Dennis' Draft of the Unix Timesharing System: not so draft? In-Reply-To: <20161219201031.3259D18C0A1@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20161219201031.3259D18C0A1@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 3:10 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > > Not really a response to your question, but I'd looked at that > ​ ​ > 'UnixEditionZero' and was very taken with this line, early on: > > "the most important features of UNIX are its simplicity [and] elegance" > > and had been meaning for some time to send in a rant. > > The variants of Unix done later by others sure fixed that, didn't they? :-( > ​One of my favorite comparisons and definitions of "bloat" came when I discovered years ago that the SVR3 >>boot<< system was larger than the V6 kernel. ​ > > > On a related note, great as my respect is for Ken and Doug for their work > on > ​ ​ > early Unix (surely the system with the greatest bang/buck ratio ever), ​+1​ > I have > ​ ​ > to disagree with them about Multics. In particular, if one is going to > have a > ​ ​ > system as complex as modern Unices have become, one might as well get the > ​ ​ > power of Multics for it. Alas, we have the worst of both worlds - the size, > ​ ​ > _without_ the power. > ​Mumble -- Other than one important idea (single-level-store as you said), I'm not so sure.​ I think we ended up with most of what was envisioned, and some of the SW things (like the "continuation" model and how dyn-linking ended up working in practice) - I think we are ahead of Multics. Winders more than UNIX (IMO) ended up with the complexity and bloat and most of the bad ideas without the good. But I think UNIX mostly was able to stick to what was important (except for the loss of "small is beautiful" - my rant). Some of the HW idea moved on - Intel picked up segments and rings. Look at INTEL*64, we use 2 rings and stopped using using segments because it too hard to program around them --- both proved to be unusable/impractical when they were released. > > (Of course, Multics made some mistakes - primarily in thinking that the > future > ​ ​ > of computing lay in large, powerful central machines, but other aspects of > the system - such as the single-level store - clearly were the right > ​ ​ > direction. ​I agree, and this may yet come back. It's too bad too many of the younger engineers have not studied it. I was recently reviewing some stuff from a couple of our younger Linux jockeys and they have re-invented something like it. I smiled and said -- yes it >>is<< a great idea, but it has been done.​ > And wouldn't it be nice to have AIM boxes to run our browsers and > ​ ​ > mail-readers in - so much for malware!) > ​Indeed.​ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: