Re: A Customer's Request For Open Source Software

[aek@vib.usr.pu.ru (Alexander Kopilovitch)]

Robert I. Eachus wrote:

>What was so wonderful about Multics?  In part, that it wasn't built
>around a file system, it was built around virtual memory.  I won't go
>into the gory details here--you can find the Organik book if you haven't
>read it.  But the memory concept in Multics was that everything was made
>of segments, and a process had access to segments.  (Of course, some of
>the things in those segments were links to other segments.)

What is not so wonderful about Multics? That it is almost mythical in part,
somehow like ancient Greece - famous, with obvious conceptual heritage, but
unreachable for observation and study. You mentioned Organik's book - well,
here is a copy of single review for it at Amazon:

------------------------------------------------------------------
Organick describes the design of Multics, a mainframe timesharing system that
was one of the most influential software efforts of the late 1960s. The book
describes the internals of the Multics system with a clarity and thoroughness
that set a standard for other writers on operating systems. The book describes
Multics as it was planned in the late 1960s, before it had been released to
users, and it describes the version of the system that ran on the GE-645
computer. Multics became a commercial product from Honeywell on a substantially
enhanced machine and continued to evolve for 20 years, so readers should
understand that they are reading about the system designers' intentions and
plans, and not necessarily about features of the commercial system.
(disclosure: I worked on Multics in the 60s and helped review drafts of some
chapters of this book before publication.) 
-----------------------------------------------------------------

After all, another Organik's book is about ill-fated, although also famous
that time Intel 432 processor (by the way, I remember vague rumors that that
processor somehows implements/supports Ada directly in hardware) - was this
author specializing on the subjects that were impressive in design, but have
no real perspective as products?

Anyway, it seems that Multics world was very closed world, consisting of
competent, creative and ethusiastic people,,, who appreciate each other, but
were disinterested in presenting the results of their work to broader community.
If this impression is wrong then how can one explain apparent absence of
publications describing the developed Multics system? Certainly it is a tradition
in science and even in engineering to describe thoroughly every significant
project, which results may influence future progress.



Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia