Least We Forget: Multics

[Barry Margolin]

Hey, stop talking like Multics* is dead!  There are some of us who still
believe in it.  Me, I work for Honeywell doing Multics systems
programming.  It was the first *real* computer I had ever used; I
learned computing on a PDP-8 in HS, and then hung around the Radio Shack
playing with Trash-80's for a while.  When I came to MIT I learned what
a computer is supposed to do.

I might consider Multics dead when everyone's desktop Unix(tm) has
demand-paging, a tera-word per process segmented virtual memory
file-system, dynamic linking, and hardware support for three orthogonal
access control mechanisms.  Yes, Unix has a number of important features
that Multics lacks.  You might be interested to know that I don't
consider pipes to be one of them; pipes are a kludge to get around the
fact that dynamic linking was hard to implement, so instead of making it
easy to call lots of subroutines, you start up a process and read its
output.

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*Multics is a registered trademark of Honeywell Information Systems.
-- 
    Barry Margolin
    ARPA: barmar at MIT-Multics
    UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar