Re: [TUHS] Apollo Domain/OS

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 5:03 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson@eschatologist.net>
wrote:

> My understanding is that there’s a direct line from MULTICS to Prime to
> Apollo,

Yes in some ways...



> in that Apollo was founded by former Prime folks who took their philosophy
> with them.
>
Actually not quite.  MIT/Multics to Honeywell to Pr1me to Apollo (to
Belmont/Stellar)  Bill P and his former TA from MIT (Mike Spourer) actually
wanted to break a little when they did Apollo.  The whole ideas was too
risky for Honeywell, so he created Pr1me.    Apollo was too risky for Pr1me
so he created Apollo.  Stellar was too risky for Apollo so he created
Belmont - a.k.a. Stellar.

[By the way, I spoke to Bill over the holidays.  He's a still the same].

>
> Apollo’s operating system (Aegis, Domain, Domain/OS) had a lot of good and
> interesting ideas and was quite influential

I absolutely agree.

But a number new idea were from an influx of MIT and ex-DEC folks
actually.  And that that terrible sin called the registry that lives on
winders came from Paul (some of us thought it was a bad idea then too BTW).

IMO: The best idea was the typed file system and the ability to run user
code specific with a file type.  That's how IP, TCP, UDP are all
implemented.  Very, very cool.  There is a USENIX paper that describes it
I'll have to dig up the reference.  It's worth reading.  But I have never
seen it implemented again as well.




> A lot of what we take for granted today in distributed computing came via
> Apollo more than anywhere else, as Apollo users and alumni took what they
> learned to other systems.
>
Yes and no.   I agree it was a wonderful intellectual playground for some
very cool ideas.   Some worked pretty well, but not all did.  For example,
as Larry said earlier today, the "twin'ed" or diskless nodes were awful
(replace the S with C for what many of us think about them).  But it got
Sun to make them too and ended up being a great add-in disk business
later.  I refused at Masscomo and ended up losing war, even though the cost
of a WS500 was less than a Sun2 with a disk, people bought Sun's diskless
and then after they discovered they sucked, spent another 6K to buy a desk
system for them (we lost for economics, but I was technically right -
a.k.a. Cole's law of economics vs. sophisticated technology).

Anyway, we (as a community) are better for having that system but other
than the registry, I can think of little actual technology that we continue
to use from Aegis.

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