Multics bloat??? Are you sure???

[isodonovan at brb.isnet.inmos.co.uk]

Hi!

In article <1990Dec9.194753.436 at odi.com>, benson at odi.com (Benson I. Margulies) writes:
> I'll regret this, but:

maybe, but not on my account!

I used a Multics system (running on a Honeywell DPS 870) for about 2 years 
when I worked at the Compuing Centre at University College Cardiff (Wales, UK).
I only have a user's appreciation for it - I know nothing of the internal 
workings.

All I can say is that I found it easy to use - very intuitive.  Being able to
access the abilities of the OS as commands or as subroutines was great.  Simple
things like hijacking the prompt routine at any time to make it do almost
anything...  Access control lists were easy, as were removing a file from a
directory and replacing it with a pointer to somewhere else...

Above all it was friendly and easy to understand.

I had this idea that as time went on computer systems should get simpler to
use, more friendly, easier to understand.  Multics did all of those things like
no other system I've worked with.  

It's been good to see some of these functions creeping into VMS (which I use
most of the time) but it still does not have the same 'feeling' that Multics
did.

Unix, by contrast seems to be quite alien and hostile (MS-DOS ditto).

All in all, I would have preferred a future of Multics+Algol68 to one
of Unix+C!

Cheers,

  Brian

> 
> 
> -- 
> Benson I. Margulies
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