Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies
From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: NeXT and Multics-bashing
Message-ID: <76700135@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 12 Feb 90 17:39:48 GMT
References: <5646@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Lines: 14
Nf-ID: #R:blake.acs.washington.edu:5646:p.cs.uiuc.edu:76700135:000:501
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Feb 11 18:17:00 1990


Multics was written in PL/1.

Which is almost as portable as assembly!  hehe....

Why did Multics fail?  My turn to flame.

1.  The kernel was 50,000 lines of code.
2.  Multics wasn't portable because of segmentation.
3.  4 levels of indirection for every memory reference is   kind of   a drag
    (even with caches).
4.  Basing everything on segments (Multics) is marginally  better than
    basing everything on files (Unix)
5.  Unix correctly predicted that byte-oriented machines would prevail.