> 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!)