Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!ists!yunexus!davecb
From: davecb@yunexus.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: the Multics from the black lagoon :-)
Message-ID: <7381@yunexus.UUCP>
Date: 8 Feb 90 00:56:59 GMT
References: <8859@portia.Stanford.EDU> <20571@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <49956@sgi.sgi.com> <4791@helios.ee.lbl.gov> <2093@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Feb7.221800.804@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: York U. Computing Services
Lines: 40



In article <2093@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes: 
| UNIX is just
| beginning to implement some of the ideas which have been working in
| Multics for two decades, such as mapping files to memory.

henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
| Gee, how could we ever have lived without that for two decades?  :-)
| Maybe because we don't need it and it doesn't buy us very much?  Unix
| evolution is now largely controlled by the marketdroids, who evaluate
| systems by the length of the checklist of features.  All sorts of
| silly and bizarre features are now crawling out of the woodwork and
| burrowing into Unix as a result.  This does not necesarily mean said
| features are good or desirable or even useful.

  From a Multician: the scheme for mapping files into memory on Multics was
very simple by comparison to some of the Unix add-ons, and well integrated
into the architecture.  Marketers often err in the direction of adding
incompatable, ill-conceived versions of usefull features... just to say they
"have" them.

  Very bluntly, Multics-style unification of the concept of a named file and
a named memory segment is one of the things that was best left out of Unix.
  To put it in at this stage of the game is to turn a OS noted for its
elegant file system inside-out...  To make files depend on the details of
(some particular) Unix memory managment is to select an inauspicious kludge
as your distinguishing feature.

  Now if you want to rethink it from scratch, and **design** it in, thats
another story.  Maybe named Mach.

--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.