From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2016 16:11:16 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Dennis' Draft of the Unix Timesharing System: not so draft? In-Reply-To: References: <20161219201031.3259D18C0A1@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 3:59 PM, Clem Cole wrote: > > 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. > To be fair, I think some of the complexity is because hardware is more complex now. It never ceases to amaze me how baroque some of Intel's stuff has become. 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. > Yeah. The only remaining vestige of x86 segmentation seems to be FS and GS, which are often used for thread local storage. (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: