Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!sco!seanf
From: seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Late Bloomers Revisited
Message-ID: <4181@scolex.sco.COM>
Date: 20 Dec 89 09:46:33 GMT
References: <1517@aber-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan)
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Lines: 28

In article <1517@aber-cs.UUCP> pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
>In article <10248@alice.UUCP> dmr@alice.UUCP writes:
>    Specifics: Multics was sophisticated, but I would not call it
>    simple and efficient.

Elegant, in what it did, I would add.

>Well, I beg to differ. Compared to things like VMS, System V, BSD Unix,
>etc..., Multics was remarkably small, simple, and fast. 

Huh?  Multics is/was *huge* (all those lines of PL/I add up, you know 8-))!.
Seriously, we're talking hundreds of thousands of lines of code, I believe.
The "kernel" was, I suppose, smaller than you would expect, but Mach is tiny
comparatively (for the same reasons...).

>I find that a lot of
>people tend to forget that Multics run machines on which you would not today
>run GNU Emacs. 

GNU Emacs is a poorly-written program.  There *was* a version of emacs that
ran under Multics, and even had a LISP-interpreter, I believe.

As for efficient, I'm going to plug NOS on a CDC Cyber 8-).

-- 
Sean Eric Fagan  | "Time has little to do with infinity and jelly donuts."
seanf@sco.COM    |    -- Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck), _Magnum, P.I._
(408) 458-1422   | Any opinions expressed are my own, not my employers'.