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From: csimmons@jewel.oracle.com (Charles Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: NeXT and Multics-bashing
Message-ID: <1990Feb11.072300.19459@oracle.com>
Date: 11 Feb 90 07:23:00 GMT
References: <5646@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Sender: news@oracle.com
Reply-To: csimmons@oracle.com
Organization: Oracle Corp
Lines: 17

In article <5646@blake.acs.washington.edu>,
mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin) writes:
> It may be said that Tenex and TOPS-20 are powerful operating systems
> hidden behind a powerless environment, whereas Unix is a powerless
> operating system hidden behind a powerful environment.  The demise of
> the former and success of the latter attests to which is more
> important today.  Multics, however, was a powerful operating system
> with a powerful environment...and died solely due to marketing
> (actually, marketing had a good hand in the death of TOPS-20 but
> that's another story...).

My personal theory is that Unix was successful in the marketplace
solely because it was written in C, and hence was moderately portable.
Multics was probably written in assembler, and probably depended a lot
on 36-bit integers, and hence probably wasn't very easy to port.

-- Chuck