On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 3:10 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

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? :-(

One of my favorite comparisons and definitions of "bloat" came when I discovered years ago that the SVR3 >>boot<< system was larger than the V6 kernel.

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.

Mumble -- Other than one important idea (single-level-store as you said), I'm not so sure. I think we ended up with most of what was envisioned, and some of the SW things (like the "continuation" model and how dyn-linking ended up working in practice) - I think we are ahead of Multics. Winders more than UNIX (IMO) ended up with the complexity and bloat and most of the bad ideas without the good. But I think UNIX mostly was able to stick to what was important (except for the loss of "small is beautiful" - my rant). Some of the HW idea moved on - Intel picked up segments and rings. Look at INTEL*64, we use 2 rings and stopped using using segments because it too hard to program around them --- both proved to be unusable/impractical when they were released.

(Of course, Multics made some mistakes - primarily 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.

I agree, and this may yet come back. It's too bad too many of the younger engineers have not studied it. I was recently reviewing some stuff from a couple of our younger Linux jockeys and they have re-invented something like it. I smiled and said -- yes it >>is<< a great idea, but it has been done.

And wouldn't it be nice to have AIM boxes to run our browsers and

mail-readers in - so much for malware!)

Indeed.