Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!decvax!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!ptsfa!ihnp4!alberta!calgary!thompson
From: thompson@calgary.UUCP (Bruce Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: The 'edge' in OS-designs
Message-ID: <1393@vaxb.calgary.UUCP>
Date: 26 Feb 88 17:18:57 GMT
References: <2760@enea.se>
Organization: U. of Calgary, Calgary, Ab.
Lines: 39
Summary: Some ideas

In article <2760@enea.se>, pesv@enea.se (Peter Svenson) writes:
> 
> I wonder whether there is any research going on in the area of advanced
> O/S designs? What is advanced?  Well, like ''the next generation''
> I have been wondering if there is no better way to organize a system's
> structure than the now quite dated directory-subdirectory filesystems.
> Also most O/S's, no matter how distinct ususally behave in the same
> general manner when it comes to multitasking, virtual memory, etc.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> -- 
> Peter (turbo) Svenson	pesv@enea (UUCP)   enea!pesv@seismo.arpa (ARPA)
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> The Kabbalistic Karate Viking from outer space.Save it, chum. Long time, no Foo 


    Just to throw my 2 cents worth in, I would like to point people in the 
direction of Honeywell's MULTICS. This was a machine which was vastly ahead of
it's time, and who's main problem now is that it's old, and the hardware isn't
very fast. We have a large installation of MULTICS here at the University of 
Calgary, and at the least, it's impressive. Particularly at the level of 
virtual memory, and run-time dynamic linking. What is truly unfortunate, is 
that few operating systems in the big wide world seem to have made use of any
of the lessons learned with MULTICS. In these days of HUGE virtual address
spaces available to processes, and low-cost high-speed paralel machines
(for example the Transputer) becoming available, a MULTICS-like O/S 
Architecture would seem to fit the bill rather nicely. BTW, MULTICS does use
multiple CPUs, but what the organization is, I don't know.

	TTFN,
	Bruce Thompson

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