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Multics: An Ancestor of Unix
- kjs3 7y agoThere's a pretty good site covering DEC RSTS operating system here: http://elvira.stacken.kth.se/rsts/rsts_80th_birthday.html http://elvira.stacken.kth.se/rsts/rsts_80th_birthday.html The Multics site is definitely worth spending some quality time with.
- ErikAugust 7y agoUnix (eunuchs), the castrated Multics. No, really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
- egdod 7y agoNever heard the “eunuchs” reference before. I always just thought it was a play on being simpler (uni vs multi).
- mixmastamyk 7y agoYes, believe that is more correct.
- rbanffy 7y agoI think they used "UNiplexed Information and Computing Service"
- Isamu 7y agoNot sure why you are downvoted but this is correct, the name Unix is a joke about Multics, which they felt was a bit unwieldy. Unix is a reaction to what they felt was over-wrought operating system design. Plan 9 is obviously a joke name too.
- microcolonel 7y ago> Plan 9 is obviously a joke name too. Bell Labs replacing the Outer Space in Plan 9 From Outer Space, a schlocky 1959 sci-fi horror film. The subtitle is UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS FROM OUTER SPACE PARALYZE THE LIVING AND RESURRECT THE DEAD.
- PaulHoule 7y agoIn Multics you always mmap'ed files -- that seems crazy to me now that I write asyncio systems inspired by the old mainframe transaction processing systems such as CICS. There is nothing more synchronous, blocking, and dependent on expensive MMU operations than mmap.
- ncmncm 7y agoMMU operations are a lot more expensive now than they once were. In particular, one of the most expensive things about mmap today is actually munmap, that trashes the translation lookaside buffer ("TLB"), the cache of memory map lookups, on all the other cores that run threads in the same process. When you had only the one core, that didn't need to happen. NetBSD used to have "UVM", where they played memory mapping tricks to get "zero-copy" networking. They had to give it up when they went to multiple cores.
- rbanffy 7y agoSynchronous and blocking is not that bad in timesharing systems, as the computer always has something else to do while it waits for the IO to complete. As for the expensive MMU operations, as someone pointed out before, they were not always as expensive as we currently have to make them when we need to guard against leaks between processes and multiple CPUs sharing unified memories and caches.
- jacquesm 7y agoVarnish seems to get good mileage out of that strategy.
- emmelaich 7y agoAnd riffing off the fact that the previous Bell Labs Unix was version 8.
- LukeShu 7y agoDo you have a source for that? Bell Labs Unix had version 9 in 1986 and version 10 in 1989. I suppose it's possible that these happened after Plan 9 was named; but as best as I can tell, work on Plan 9 started in 1987[1]; after V9 Unix had been released. [1]: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9 http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9
- smorrow 7y agoEarliest reference to Plan 9 is 1984: http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/unix-before-berkeley/ http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/unix-before-berkeley/
- LukeShu 7y agoThat 1984 year doesn't seem to be entirely accurate; at a minimum, the article has had additions since 1984 (including the 1998 death of John Lions). The abstract notes that it was published in DaemonNews in 1999. I tracked down the DaemonNews publication: https://web.archive.org/web/20000819035036/http://www.daemonnews.org/199903/history.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000819035036/http://www.daemon... The copy in DaemonNews includes citations that were elided from the copies on cat-v.org and darwinsys.com. Notably, we see that line change from > (More recently, much of this work has been consolidated into an operating system called Plan 9 From Bell Laboratories.) to > (More recently, much of this work has been consolidated into an operating system called Plan 9 From Bell Laboratories.)[Pike1990a, Pike1995a]
- emmelaich 7y agoUnfortunately no. I may be wrong. However I think plan9 started as a skunkworks project well before Unix v9 was released. [edit - wikipedia maybe supports me ] > Plan 9 from Bell Labs was originally developed, starting in the mid-1980s,
- microcolonel 7y agoProbably some people are not pleased with your comment because it reminded them of genitals, and we aren't to be reminded of genitals in public anymore, apparently.
- dmix 7y agoWow I wish every major technical project from that early preinternet era had such a thorough and well documented archival website. Kudos to the people who put the effort into doing this. There was a post earlier about the Windows 95 UI development that referenced and old site written by original employees on the project talking about the development process. But the site was offline and didn’t get picked up by the archives. There’s so many of those major contributions like Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, all of the mainframe people and early PC companies, etc who probably have a thousand small stories that the world would benefit from collecting. Digital archival and documentation is a noble and valuable philanthropic cause IMO, which I hope continues to grow. Especially as all of us “early” programmers start getting older and history starts repeating itself at a faster rate.
- unixhero 7y agoWell. HP PA-RISC Alpha architecture machines also have such a shrine, exhaustively documenting the period and hardware: https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_pa-risc_story.html https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_pa-risc_story.html
- octotoad 7y agoFYI for anyone confused by this: Alpha and PA-RISC are two different architectures and vendors. I’m guessing the mention of Alpha in your comment was a slip of the tongue/brain, given the topic :)
- unixhero 7y agoAh I didn't know Alpha was just a marketing or brand name. Thanks for the heads up!
- mytec 7y agoHere is a link to the Michigan Terminal System (MTS), developed in the late 60's. http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/home http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/home
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- tartoran 7y agoSee Multics Run - Stan Zanarotti https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjG4m77PQm8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjG4m77PQm8