Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:10599 comp.os.misc:697 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.os.misc Subject: Re: Does anyone still use Multics?? Message-ID: <12778@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 9 Dec 88 21:04:58 GMT References: <6392@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> <281@cs-spool.calgary.UUCP> <33003@think.UUCP> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Distribution: na Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 23 In article <33003@think.UUCP> barmar@kulla.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin) writes: | I don't recall how much the book talks about details of the file | system implementation, but it was extensively revised in the early | 70's. Additionally, at the time the book was written, the ring | security facility was implemented primarily in software (resulting in | many unavoidable security holes), and it was later moved into the | hardware; all the stuff in the book about the gatekeeper routine is | obsolete. This has been discussed in arch a bit, and I have to feel that if someone were going to market an o/s which is already B2 security certified they would buy the Multics rights and put it on the Intel 386. Not to get into a CPU war, but the 386 has just the rings of protection in hardware needed to implement Multics. When I first saw the chip spec I thought of Multics. Being able to do the memory mapped file i/o in hardware via segments is certainly not hard to take, either. Maybe someday we could have home Multics systems? -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me