Is UNIX(TM) Multi-User?

[Joel Spolsky]

In article <11945 at steinmetz.ge.com|  davidsen at crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
| In article <365 at pigs.UUCP> haugj at pigs.UUCP (Joe Bob Willie) writes:
| 
| | is unix REALLY a multi-user operating system?  or does it just act that
| | way because it is a multi-tasking o/s?  
| 
|   Any multitasking o/s can be a multiuser system, provided that the user
| agent (shell or whatever) is a normal process. Given this, you can have
| multiple user agents running, connected to several users.
| 
|   Note that this does not claim that any such o/s will work WELL for
| multiple users ... 

Right! For example, OS/2 (ack barf) is a multitasking operating system
that will never work very well for multiple users, simply because the
assumption that there is only one user is so pervasive:

  --there is no concept of file ownership
  --a single process, the "foreground" process, gets the largest slices
    of cpu time because that's the one that the single user sees 
  --the system assumes one keyboard, one mouse, and one monitor, and 
    probably (I dont know this) assumes that the monitor is mapped
    into main memory.

Joel Spolsky
Bell Communications Research and
Yale University

(neither of whom I speak for :-)