Re: Filenames in Ada

[Dave Thompson <david.thompson1@worldnet.att.net>]

On Thu, 01 Dec 2005 07:59:45 +0100, Martin Krischik
<krischik@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
<snip>
> Well, Windows is full of Hacks as well. An so is Unix. Just yesterday I read
> that the "Uni" in Unix stands for "single user". Originally Unix was a
> scaled down single user alternative to "Multrix". Well that explains a lot.

Multics, the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service. See
www.multicians.org for (much!) more. Not single user -- even the very
first, internal Bell Labs systems had multiple concurrent users -- but
small numbers of users: then perhaps 2-10 on a minicomputer, today
typically 10s to 100s (real users e.g. shell not say HTTP requesters,
which could be hugely more), compared to the big-iron mainframe
timesharing systems of the day which were 100s to many 1000s.

> Indeed there is only one real user on Unix - the user with the ID 0.
> 
What do you mean "real"? There is only one superuser id, or
equivalently all system/manager privileges/roles are combined into one
userid, which is certainly a limitation that is sometimes a problem.
But Unix does (or perhaps Unices do, since there are now a range of
them) support multiple "ordinary" users pretty well. If competently
administered, which many personal (Linux etc.) systems aren't.

- David.Thompson1 at worldnet.att.net