[TUHS] Re: Book: "You Are Not Expected to Understand This"

On Mon, Nov 14, 2022 at 9:16 AM Douglas McIlroy < douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu&gt; wrote: Yep -- but not surprising. There were a bunch of folks at DG that had worked on a single-level store system (Project Fountain-Head) that had failed [some of that story is described in Kidder's book]. They had studied Multics extensively, and that system supposedly had taken a great deal from it. I never completely knew what happened other than something went south and it end up getting canceled. I later got to know of a number of the MV10000 folks (who later joined us in the HW team at Stellar). But I believe a bit issue with Fountain Head was both new HW and SW, whereas the MV10000 allowed Nova /Eclipse code to 'just work.' [Kidder makes a big deal out of this in the book]. The lessons and relevance to TUHS I think are a couple of things: 1.) When they did DG-UX, the SW folks had previously developed a kernel with that view, so it's not surprising. 2.) Cost of >>solution development<< is the real end-customer/deployer driver (economics beats architecture). Clem ᐧ