4 ms·
Don't over-engineer your products, or you'll end up with a product that fails in the market; like MULTICS. While it might have failed in the long term anyway,
by hga 10y ago
Don't over-engineer your products, or you'll end up with a product that fails in the market; like MULTICS.
While it might have failed in the long term anyway, Multics didn't fail because of market reasons. It failed because first, Honeywell was incompetent at developing serious hardware, e.g. officially blaming the failure of the first (and only, I guess) clean slate Multics CPU project on the decision to microcode the machine. Something which IBM had previously used in the System/360 to dominate the market....
That caused more and more problems as its async CPUs fell further and further behind, although this was still in the discrete logic days, and you could easily use up to 6 in a configuration, and more with a kludge. But it was still selling well, especially in France, where Bull seriously pushed it.
Then it was deliberately killed off due to internal politics, it seems that trying to smash together three computer companies, Honeywell's original stuff, GE's including Multics, and SDS -> Xerox -> Honeywell, creates a situation where killing off rival systems makes sense to political winners who just might not be technological winners.
That Multics was doomed by all this was self-evident to me in the 1979, one reason I never spent any serious time on it.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoInteresting. I didn't hear that angle before. So, you don't think cost of like $7 million for probably less performance wasn't going to end it? Far as rivals part, that same thing happened once HP had both NonStop and OpenVMS. One had to go. Whereas Unisys did it on purpose when it acquired CTOS, a distributed mainframe. They weren't taking any chances on that one haha.
- hga 10y agoIt all depends on what you want to do with it. Crunch numbers? No way after some point. Prepare the Air Force's annual budget submission without information leaking? A real example of a perfect fit. Or provide the IT for MIT's EECS department? Good fit, until MIT-MULTICS was shut down as part of Honeywell killing Multics and the Cambridge lab which did work on it (I played a role in moving off that).
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOk, well that makes sense.