[TUHS] Apollo Domain/OS

Kevin Bowling kevin.bowling at kev009.com
Wed Jan 22 08:43:51 AEST 2020


On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 3:39 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 5:03 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson at eschatologist.net> wrote:
>>
>> My understanding is that there’s a direct line from MULTICS to Prime to Apollo,
>
> Yes in some ways...
>
>
>>
>> in that Apollo was founded by former Prime folks who took their philosophy with them.
>
> Actually not quite.  MIT/Multics to Honeywell to Pr1me to Apollo (to Belmont/Stellar)  Bill P and his former TA from MIT (Mike Spourer) actually wanted to break a little when they did Apollo.  The whole ideas was too risky for Honeywell, so he created Pr1me.    Apollo was too risky for Pr1me so he created Apollo.  Stellar was too risky for Apollo so he created Belmont - a.k.a. Stellar.
>
> [By the way, I spoke to Bill over the holidays.  He's a still the same].

I respect someone that is willing to put their time (and money?) where
their mouth is like that.  Would he be willing to write up some
post-mortems on some of these?  I believe at least late Apollo and
Stellar can qualify as unix?

>>
>>
>> Apollo’s operating system (Aegis, Domain, Domain/OS) had a lot of good and interesting ideas and was quite influential
>
> I absolutely agree.
>
> But a number new idea were from an influx of MIT and ex-DEC folks actually.  And that that terrible sin called the registry that lives on winders came from Paul (some of us thought it was a bad idea then too BTW).
>
> IMO: The best idea was the typed file system and the ability to run user code specific with a file type.  That's how IP, TCP, UDP are all implemented.  Very, very cool.  There is a USENIX paper that describes it I'll have to dig up the reference.  It's worth reading.  But I have never seen it implemented again as well.
>
>
>
>>
>> A lot of what we take for granted today in distributed computing came via Apollo more than anywhere else, as Apollo users and alumni took what they learned to other systems.
>
> Yes and no.   I agree it was a wonderful intellectual playground for some very cool ideas.   Some worked pretty well, but not all did.  For example, as Larry said earlier today, the "twin'ed" or diskless nodes were awful (replace the S with C for what many of us think about them).  But it got Sun to make them too and ended up being a great add-in disk business later.  I refused at Masscomo and ended up losing war, even though the cost of a WS500 was less than a Sun2 with a disk, people bought Sun's diskless and then after they discovered they sucked, spent another 6K to buy a desk system for them (we lost for economics, but I was technically right - a.k.a. Cole's law of economics vs. sophisticated technology).
>
> Anyway, we (as a community) are better for having that system but other than the registry, I can think of little actual technology that we continue to use from Aegis.


More information about the TUHS mailing list