From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:50:50 -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: > > From: Warren Toomey > > > Ritchie, D.M. The UNIX Time Sharing System. MM 71-1273-4. > > which makes me think that the draft version Doug McIlroy found > > 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? :-( > > > 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), 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. > > (Of course, Multics made some mistakes - primarly 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. And wouldn't it be nice to have AIM boxes to run our browers and > mail-readers in - so much for malware!) I've been thinking that there's likely a PhD hiding in building a Multics-style ring-like abstraction from nested virtual machines; the Dune work at Stanford took a similar tack, if one squints at it a little bit. Come to think of it, I always kind of wanted to get a PhD. Maybe that'd be an interesting research idea. Anyone looking for a student? :-) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: