[TUHS] Dennis' Draft of the Unix Timesharing System: not so draft?
Noel Chiappa
jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Tue Dec 20 06:10:31 AEST 2016
> 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!)
Noel
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