Multics bloat??? Are you sure???

[Benson I. Margulies]

I'll regret this, but:

Multics wired a trivial amount of memory. 95% of the kernel was paged,
only interrupt and fault handling was wired. Some day, Unix
implementations may do the same. (AIX does now ...)

Much Multics folklore comes from people who read Organic's (I'm sure
I'm spelling his name wrong) book, which rescribed the state of the
system long before I ever worked on it.  Other comes from internal MIT
polemics taken far out of context, like the Jargon file. Not to
mention that much of the Jargon material was written at about the same
time as Organic, when the MIT system was extremely slow, with less
than 1MB of memory, and a whole bunch of users.

Multics had all the interesting features of V.4, but it only had them
once, not 4 times from 4 predecessor versions merged together.

Multics didn't require the equivalent of fsck after reboot.

Multics had dynamic linking. Multics had fully symmetrical
multiprocessing. It had the same functionality as streams. It was the
first system certified B2, for what that's worth. Its commands had, by
and large, comprehensible and consistent names and arguments. 

Multics didn't require one to add a device driver to the kernel to
support a new device (except for those that contained file systems.)

All Multics system facilities were available from both commands and
subroutines.  No Multics subroutine printed a mysterious error cookie
on the terminal, they all returned some sort of error indication.

Multics could fit, without much bother, on the machines that are now
required for commercial Unix systems -- 12MB, several mips.

The Multics development group never found time or interest in writing
about the system, and the MIT academic community had written operating
systems off as old hat years ago. 

In short, Multics' sins were that it was ahead of its time and that it
was owned by a company that preferred to see it dead than in
competition with its batch OS offering, GCOS. Five to ten years ago,
little v7 Unix was a neat way to get a nearly-Multics OS onto an itty
bitty computer. Now, V.4 and related projects are running as fast at
they can to stick back in everything that the original Unix authors
(refugees from the Multics project) took out. Only it dosen't always
fit so well. Such is life.

Finally, only the ignorant spelled Multics in capital letters.

ps: in case you haven't guessed, I was one of its developers, and I
miss it. I hope that there's a place in hades reserved for the
Honeywell execs responsible for never selling it seriously.


-- 
Benson I. Margulies