Path: utzoo!censor!geac!yunexus!davecb
From: davecb@yunexus.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Late Bloomers Revisited (re Multics)
Message-ID: <5960@yunexus.UUCP>
Date: 20 Dec 89 23:18:09 GMT
References: <1517@aber-cs.UUCP> <10248@alice.UUCP>
Organization: York U. Computing Services
Lines: 42

>In article <10248@alice.UUCP> dmr@alice.UUCP writes:
>    Specifics: Multics was sophisticated, but I would not call it
>    simple and efficient.

pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
> Well, I beg to differ. Compared to things like VMS, System V, BSD Unix,
> etc..., Multics was remarkably small, simple, and fast. I find that a lot of
> people tend to forget that Multics run machines on which you would not today
> run GNU Emacs.

   Alas, BSD 4.3 still isn't as large as Multics, although 4.4 may
make it (;-)).

   As a former Multician (DRBrown.TSDC@HI-Mulics.ARPA) and still Multics
bigot, I have to agree with both peter and dmr.

  It suffered from "sophistication", in that the primitives they picked
as being sufficent for the task were large, often complex "objects", usually
described properly as subsystems.  They were, however, few in number and
conceptually simple, which made it easy to reason about once you got past
that first horrible case of information overload...
   As to fast, it varied.  The early releases bottlenecked seriously in
a number of areas (mostly due to implementation, phew!).  Mine was a 
release 9 on the DPS-8M hardware base and ran like a workstation (:-)).
  Also, there was no such thing as a small configuration, which meant that
the machines usually got loaded with everybody and his brother as soon as
they arrived, lest the investment not pay off.  Net result: 130 users and
fair to poor response.

  To return to late blooming, I've seen a few of the good ideas quietly
resurface (memory mapped segments/files), and the bad ones (like small
segments: only 2^18 bytes) pop back up like a handfull of bad pennys.  Ah
well, it just proves that he who knows not history is doomed to reinvent
it.  
--dave
 

-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@yunexus, ...!yunexus!davecb or
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | {toronto area...}lethe!dave 
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CANADA. 416-223-8968  |    He's so smart he's dumb.