[TUHS] Re: Book: "You Are Not Expected to Understand This"

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Mon, Nov 14, 2022 at 9:16 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> "One view of the memory, period." That describes Multics.
>
Yep -- but not surprising.   There were a bunch of folks at DG that had
worked on a single-level store system (Project Fountain-Head) that had
failed [some of that story is described in Kidder's book]. They had studied
Multics extensively, and that system supposedly had taken a great deal from
it.  I never completely knew what happened other than something went south
and it end up getting canceled.  I later got to know of a number of the
MV10000 folks (who later joined us in the HW team at Stellar).   But I
believe a bit issue with Fountain Head was both new HW and SW, whereas the
MV10000 allowed Nova /Eclipse code to 'just work.'  [Kidder makes a big
deal out of this in the book].

The lessons and relevance to TUHS I think are a couple of things:
1.) When they did DG-UX, the SW folks had previously developed a kernel
with that view, so it's not surprising.
2.) Cost of >>solution development<< is the real end-customer/deployer
driver (economics beats architecture).

Clem
ᐧ

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