Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Operating Systems (Re: archimedes)
Message-ID: <12655@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 23 Nov 88 15:55:30 GMT
References: <12633@steinmetz.ge.com> <6191@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 26

In article <6191@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green) writes:

| On the other hand, we're also moving into the era of networking and
| ISDN... if we implement a full-fledged network, where any machine is
| capable of connecting to any other machine (as vs. limited systems
| where the "leafs" can only access a "server"), I see what you mean.

  I have gotten a bit of mail on this, and I would like to clarify that
I am not claiming that systems such as MS-DOS and CP/M are not useful,
just that they are not general purpose operating systems. As the size of
disks gets larger, having the o/s protect the files against an errant
program becomes more important to the user. It's nice to have read only
files which are really read only, because they're owned by someone else
and a program running as you can't cause too much trouble.

  One of the real shortcomings in many operating systems is the lack of
"append" permission, or lack of enforcement of it. There are many cases
in which a program should log its execution, but in many environments
there is no way to insure that the file is not modified. I wrote a
little error logging daemon which read stuff from a pipe, just to get by
this limitation in UNIX. I don't see a similar way to allow anyone to
add a file to a directory but not delete files.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me