[TUHS] Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?

[Adam Thornton via TUHS]

On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 6:52 PM Larry McVoy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

>
> I have a son who is more about theory, he's a math guy.  I nudged him
> towards programming, he of course went to python.  I nudged him towards
> C and he came back with the best statement ever that I have gotten from
> him: In C, you can feel the machine.  Yes, Travis, yes you can.  That's
> part of what makes C great.
>
>
But in this day and age, *can* you?  You can feel the machine if that
machine is a PDP-11.  But with a modern pipelined SMP architecture, with
prefetch and speculative execution and all that stuff...I don't think any
human *can* feel the machine anymore.

And I kind of mourn that, which is why I do retrocomputing and why my heart
will always belong to the 6502, but...while C is an accurate match for
what's going on in a single-processor system without any fancy caching, is
it really "feeling the machine" anymore?

Note: I like C.  I like Go even more.  I have not had to use Rust in anger
yet so I don't really know it.  90% of my day job is Python, and the rest
is mostly TypeScript.  I'm not arguing this from a Luddite perspective, I'm
just saying that it has been quite some time since "what the processor is
actually doing" crossed the "human ability to understand it in detail"
threshold.  Or at least, *my* human ability.  I'm not often the smartest
bear in the room, but I'm usually not the dumbest either.

Adam