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From: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Least We Forget:  Multics
Message-ID: <2336@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Jul-84 23:18:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.2336
Posted: Mon Jul  9 23:18:48 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Jul-84 00:20:16 EDT
References: <1611@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Reply-To: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 24


Hey, stop talking like Multics* is dead!  There are some of us who still
believe in it.  Me, I work for Honeywell doing Multics systems
programming.  It was the first *real* computer I had ever used; I
learned computing on a PDP-8 in HS, and then hung around the Radio Shack
playing with Trash-80's for a while.  When I came to MIT I learned what
a computer is supposed to do.

I might consider Multics dead when everyone's desktop Unix(tm) has
demand-paging, a tera-word per process segmented virtual memory
file-system, dynamic linking, and hardware support for three orthogonal
access control mechanisms.  Yes, Unix has a number of important features
that Multics lacks.  You might be interested to know that I don't
consider pipes to be one of them; pipes are a kludge to get around the
fact that dynamic linking was hard to implement, so instead of making it
easy to call lots of subroutines, you start up a process and read its
output.

--------------------
*Multics is a registered trademark of Honeywell Information Systems.
-- 
    Barry Margolin
    ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
    UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar