Why not Multics? (was Re: BSD tty security, part 3: How to Fix It)

[Rick Smith]

elg at elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) wrote a pretty good article,

with lots of stuff about why MULTICS died, giving particular attention
to its grotty hardware requirements and intrinsic incompatibility with
what everyone else was doing with hardware to support OSes.

Then he goes on to gripe about the interface...

>there were some
>half-hearted attempts at MIT and elsewhere to bag on support for graphics
>terminals and such, but a real professional job of it was never
>accomplished. About the only really user-friendly software that ran on the
>machine was an excellent version of Emacs written at MIT, ...

Now, I first encountered MULTICS just about ten years ago, having come
off of TENEX, RSX, RT-11, Unix-V6-and-a-half, and various other
dogs and cats. As far as "user friendliness" goes, MULTICS was equivalent
and usually better than the competition. It sure beat Unix back then,
though NED _was_ a terrific editor. Even PCs (mostly called "home
computers" back then) were overwhelmingly line oriented. There were
some wonderful technical fantasies out there (Alto, for instance) but
it took another couple of years for workstations and decent graphics
to be a major force.

BTW, try using EMACS on a loaded KA-10... if you want to talk s.l.o.w... !!
It ran much better on a loaded MULTICS, for "only" a few million bucks more.

> And of course the whole OS was
>designed in the late 60's and early 70's, and it showed... 

The same statement is true of UNIX and even of the Alto, which
pioneered all those user-friendlyisms we see in modern window managers.

Rick.
smith at sctc.com