20 Dec
2016
20 Dec
'16
2:59 a.m.
On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 3:10 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
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.
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.
(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.