19 Dec
2016
19 Dec
'16
9:50 p.m.
On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 3:10 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
I've been thinking that there's likely a PhD hiding in building a
Multics-style ring-like abstraction from nested virtual machines; the Dune
work at Stanford took a similar tack, if one squints at it a little bit.
Come to think of it, I always kind of wanted to get a PhD. Maybe that'd be
an interesting research idea. Anyone looking for a student? :-)
From: Warren
Toomey
Ritchie, D.M. The UNIX Time Sharing System. MM
71-1273-4.
which makes me think that the draft version Doug McIlroy found
Not really a response to your question, but I'd looked at that
'UnixEditionZero' and was very taken with this line, early on:
"the most important features of UNIX are its simplicity [and] elegance"
and had been meaning for some time to send in a rant.
The variants of Unix done later by others sure fixed that, didn't they? :-(
On a related note, great as my respect is for Ken and Doug for their work
on
early Unix (surely the system with the greatest bang/buck ratio ever), I
have
to disagree with them about Multics. In particular, if one is going to
have a
system as complex as modern Unices have become, one might as well get the
power of Multics for it. Alas, we have the worst of both worlds - the size,
_without_ the power.
(Of course, Multics made some mistakes - primarly in thinking that the
future
of computing lay in large, powerful central machines, but other aspects of
the system - such as the single-level store - clearly were the right
direction. And wouldn't it be nice to have AIM boxes to run our browers and
mail-readers in - so much for malware!)