Multics bloat??? Are you sure???

[Piercarlo Grandi]

On 1 Dec 90 23:01:26 GMT, eric at snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) said:

eric> I will incorporate several of your corrections. Upon doing a
eric> context grep for MULTICS it does seem that the references to it
eric> are uniformly negative. That is unfair and was unintended; though
eric> I agree with the charge that MULTICS became somewhat bloated and
eric> at least partly a victim of design grandiosity, I also do think
eric> that it expressed some of the best thinking about OS design in its
eric> day and doesn't deserve to be `sneered at' by anyone.

Especially as it is smaller and faster and more efficient than SVR4, or
4.3BSD, etc... Multics was a large system for its day -- it was slow
when running more than a dozen users on a 1MIPS, 2MB machine :-). I
remember enjoying excellent response time on an 8 MIPS, 32MB machine
(approx.) when logged in with a couple hundred other users.

I would really like having somebody tell us what is the wired down code
size of a fairly recent Multics release (10, for example) vs. SVR4 or
Ultrix or SunOS etc...
--
Piercarlo Grandi                   | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg at cs.aber.ac.uk