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Article #22377Re: NeXT and Multics-bashing
From: gillies
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1990 17:39
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1990 17:39
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983 bytes
Multics was written in PL/1.
Which is almost as portable as assembly! hehe....
Why did Multics fail? My turn to flame.
1. The kernel was 50,000 lines of code.
2. Multics wasn't portable because of segmentation.
3. 4 levels of indirection for every memory reference is kind of a drag
(even with caches).
4. Basing everything on segments (Multics) is marginally better than
basing everything on files (Unix)
5. Unix correctly predicted that byte-oriented machines would prevail.
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: NeXT and Multics-bashing Message-ID: <76700135@p.cs.uiuc.edu> Date: 12 Feb 90 17:39:48 GMT References: <5646@blake.acs.washington.edu> Lines: 14 Nf-ID: #R:blake.acs.washington.edu:5646:p.cs.uiuc.edu:76700135:000:501 Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies Feb 11 18:17:00 1990