🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <20799@watdragon.waterloo.edu> tbray@watsol.waterloo.edu (Tim Bray) writes:
>mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin) writes:
>>It may be said that Tenex and TOPS-20 are powerful operating systems
>>hidden behind a powerless environment, whereas Unix is a powerless
>>operating system hidden behind a powerful environment.
>
>Gimme a break.  Unix earned its stripes running on PDP 11/34's, at a
>time whine Tenex and Tops were running on humungous (for the time)
>36-bit mainframes.  Yes, they had some neat stuff; but when I first
>worked on Unix at the relatively late date of 1978 it was *far* from
>powerless.

Yes, I meant powerless.  The Unix operating system -- the kernel --
was, and still is, relatively powerless.  For proof, review section 2
of the manual and the number of programs that must run setuid.  The
power that Unix has is in the various shells and tools that run on top
of Unix.

The lesson learned for future operating system design is that design
efforts should be for power in the environment, not in the kernel.

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