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From: darrell@sdcsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.os
Subject: Re: Who needs files?
Message-ID: <2885@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>
Date: Fri, 20-Mar-87 13:09:11 EST
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.2885
Posted: Fri Mar 20 13:09:11 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 22-Mar-87 17:04:58 EST
Sender: darrell@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, Bedford MA
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In article <2875@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> darrell@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU (Darrell Long) writes:
 
> If a Multics-like machine was designed today, instead of in 1966, it would
> probably be a much better performer.
 
> a triple-processor Level-68 Multics system could only handle about 100 users
> before becoming sluggish. Which is really great for a $5,000,000 system :-).
 
And that's 1960's dollars, probably about $15M today.  Given that you can buy
a 16M RAM, 160M disk, Sun-like display 386 machine for about $15K, that's a
thousand users equivalent.
 
> An 80386 has most of the architectural features of Multics, much improved
> (such as 32 bit addresses, 2^32 # of segments), and probably would make a
> much better basis for implementing such an architecture, than the kluged
> '60s-era GE hardware (originally intended for GECOS) that Honeywell cobbled
> together.
 
Bit of a lapse there in your history, though most of the preceeding technical
info is accurate (the machine did support 2**18 word-long segments, but
MULTICS arbitrarily limited them to 2**16).  As far as I know, Honeywell was
not involved in the genesis of MULTICS; it was a joint MIT/GE/Bell Labs
project sponsored by ARPA.  The 645 was a kludge of the commercial
product GE 635.
 
BTW, most of this was going on in the same Tech Square building and at
the same time as the seminal days of the MIT AI Lab (of "Hackers" fame)
AND the creation of IBM's CP-40, later CP-67/CMS and then the current VM
system.  An awful lot of our current world started at that very small
area in time and space.  
 
 
> I doubt that anybody will ever do it, though, with Unix around, and Honeywell
> more interested in bringing GCOS up to bronze-age standards.
 
Wanna' bet?  I'm considering calling my system MULTICS/386, which may be
possible now that Honeywell has decommitted their MULTICS.  I'm also
considering the name Elliott, in honor of the late Elliott Organick who
wrote a very important book describing MULTICS.
 
And, of course, I'm using the current equivalent of PL/I, Ada.
 
                    -- Bob Munck