At 2024-12-15T07:22:29+0000, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > But yet, there's no question that Multics was a commercial failure
>
> By which metric?  Honest question.  Multics seems to have been in
> business around 1975-2000, but I don't know if it was in the read or
> in the black.

I note that that's longer than MS-DOS was a commercial product.

People seem mighty quick to use words like "irrelevant" or "failure" as
a substitute for reasoned argument.

Maybe I would, in fact, hate using Multics.  But I can't forget that
well after Unix had fledged, its developers at CSRC found it necessary
and/or desirable to borrow back a Multics concept: they named it mmap().

Not having been concieved as desirable from the start, it was grafted
on, with negative consequences.  The archives of this list feature
multiple war stories from Larry McVoy about how, as I recollect,
unifying the buffer cache was a dragon that bedeviled every version of
Unix until SunOS 4 finally slayed it.  (Have I got that right?)

And promptly got chucked overboard for a System V kernel because that's
how glorious the software industry is.

Regards,
Branden