🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Feb7.221800.804@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp
(Henry Spencer) writes:
|    Remember that Multics and OS/360 are the two classic examples of second-
|    system effect (overconfidence after a successful first system leads to
|    vast complexity and a union-of-all-wishlists approach on the second).

pcg@rupert.cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
| To put Multics and OS/360 in the same phrase is offensive.
| Multics was very clearly designed to be as orthogonal and lean as
| possible, and it largely succeeded. The overconfidence was in
| breaking a lot of new ground, not in the inexistent morass of
| features. It was a research project after all.

	I have to  disgree with both of you here!

	Multics really was "designed", (as opposed to OS/360, which was
accreted), and it was an unusual act at the time to set out the goals and
algorithms that were to be used to achieve them in formal research papers
beforehand. [ref: (a) the MIT Multics papers, various ACM articles (b)
personal communication, one of the designers of CICS)

	Multics was supposed to be a production-quality computing service,
thus the name "MULTiplexed Computing Service".  It was by no means a
research project.  That it was not a research project annoyed Honeywell (who
loved GCOS) no end, leading to the strange algorithm:
	if year % 2 then
		announce cancellation of Multics
	else
		announce next release of Multics

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@yunexus, ...!yunexus!davecb or
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