[HN Gopher] The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System (1984)...
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The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System (1984) [pdf]
Author : agomez314
Score : 111 points
Date : 2023-07-05 10:15 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bell-labs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bell-labs.com)
| bluetomcat wrote:
| > the charter sought was not merely to write some (unspecified)
| operating system, but instead to create a system specifically
| designed for editing and formatting text, what might today be
| called a 'word-processing system.'
|
| That's an interesting perspective. Was the shell intended to be a
| glorified word processor, with tools like sort, uniq, wc? In a
| documentary from the early 1980s, Kernighan also demonstrates
| this as a "killer" feature of Unix:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Here's Ken Thompson talking about it (the word processing
| angle) quite entertainingly:
| https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=1494
| Beermotor wrote:
| IIRC it was initially employed for their payroll system to help
| print checks.
| p_l wrote:
| First commercial use in Bell Labs is usually credited as the
| secretarial pool for writing patent applications.
| somat wrote:
| I always give an ironic chuckle when fighting the print
| system on a unix machine(lpd, lp, cups...) the internal
| rant that goes with it is something like.
|
| "Printing was _THE_ original purpose, the reason for
| existence, of unix, you would think it would be a solved
| problem instead of the terrible mismatch of sins that it
| is. "
| screechingbagel wrote:
| printing on unix in my experience is quite painless
| compared to windows for example, in my experience
|
| it just works :p
| theodpHN wrote:
| What's the state of 'traditional' turnkey time sharing for coding
| + development in 2023? Are always-on, signon-and-go servers or
| clusters of servers with shared storage and a wealth of pre-
| installed software used by a community of scores or hundreds or
| thousands of developers still a common thing? Or has that pretty
| much gone by the wayside and most development is carried out in
| more isolated, individualized, single-user oriented environments
| - be it laptop/desktop or Cloud-based (containers, VMs, EC2,
| etc.) that are customized/tailored to single individual's needs?
| kedean wrote:
| Supercomputing environments I've encountered are still
| timesharing-based, because by definition they are too expensive
| to be single-user. My old university still operates a cluster-
| based system that you can submit jobs to, with "head nodes"
| that have ssh access for light work/setup (they aren't suited
| for heavy jobs). It's operated by the CS dept but available for
| others to use, the sciences in particular.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I don't know about "traditional" systems, but I'm trying to
| create a modern time-share system for building web apps.
|
| There's a work in progress at: https://gridwhale.com. (Warning:
| Still primitive and lots of bugs).
|
| My manifesto is here: https://medium.com/@gridwhale/rise-of-
| the-hyperplatforms-d4a...
| packetlost wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but the
| tilde[0] and SDF[1] communities are going pretty strong still.
| Both of them amount to getting a shell account on a shared box
| with a bunch of pre-installed/hosted utilities. Much more
| hobbyist-centric than professional though.
|
| [0]: https://tildeverse.org [1]: https://sdf.org
| genr8 wrote:
| What a coincidence, - I was reading about this last night on a
| great website:
|
| https://www.multicians.org/project-mac.html
| pcarion wrote:
| link is not working (Forbidden)
| msla wrote:
| OK, let's take this in some more context:
|
| > To the Labs computing community as a whole, the problem was the
| increasing obviousness of the failure of Multics to deliver
| promptly any sort of usable system, let alone the panacea
| envisioned earlier.
|
| What was Multics? One core animating idea of Multics was the
| "Computer Utility" concept, or centralized mainframe-based
| computing as a utility as reliable and available as water and
| power:
|
| https://multicians.org/fjcc1.html
|
| > One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system
| which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-
| future requirements of a large computer utility. Such systems
| must run continuously and reliably 7 days a week, 24 hours a day
| in a way similar to telephone or power systems, and must be
| capable of meeting wide service demands: from multiple man-
| machine interaction to the sequential processing of absentee-user
| jobs; from the use of the system with dedicated languages and
| subsystems to the programming of the system itself; and from
| centralized bulk card, tape, and printer facilities to remotely
| located terminals. Such information processing and communication
| systems are believed to be essential for the future growth of
| computer use in business, in industry, in government and in
| scientific laboratories as well as stimulating applications which
| would be otherwise undone.
|
| -- "Introduction and Overview of the Multics System", F. J.
| Corbato (MIT) and V. A. Vyssotsky (Bell Labs)
|
| This was an ambitious project and it took some time to achieve.
| Work on Multics started in 1965 and Multics was first used for
| paying customers in October of 1969, six months after Bell Labs
| dropped out and work on Unix began.
|
| https://multicians.org/chrono.html
|
| So did Multics deliver "promptly"? Probably not, but four years
| for an ambitious project isn't so bad, and it took Unix six years
| (until 1975) to get to Sixth Edition, the first version of
| Research Unix used much outside of Bell Labs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_6_Unix
|
| My point is that Multics is given short shrift by this history,
| which is understandable because it's about a completely different
| OS, but it's painted as a failure that was stalled in development
| for an inordinate amount of time. It wasn't a failure, as it was
| used commercially until 2000, and whether it was inordinately
| slow in coming is impossible to fairly judge because it was, in
| most respects, the first of its kind, in that it was the first
| "complete" OS with what we'd now consider the full complement of
| functionality.
| cafard wrote:
| Multics influenced a number of minicomputer OSes of the 1970s.
| I never used PRIMEOS, but have heard it described as a smaller
| version of Multics. I did use Data General's AOS/VS, and that
| had been influenced by Multics--so I suppose that its
| predecessor AOS also had been.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I never used PRIMEOS, but have heard it described as a
| smaller version of Multics._
|
| I've never heard PR1MEOS referred to that way, but it makes a
| lot of sense. It was a lot easier to wrap one's brain around
| than the competition.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Wikipedia says that Multics had "about 80 installations".
| That's probably a big part of why Multics is given short shrift
| - it was successfully built, but (approximately) nobody cared.
|
| Wikipedia also notes that Unix ran on less expensive hardware
| than Multics. That mattered - there were many more systems that
| Unix could be put on.
| msla wrote:
| > Wikipedia says that Multics had "about 80 installations".
|
| It was a mainframe operating system that only ran on high-end
| hardware. What do you expect?
|
| > Wikipedia also notes that Unix ran on less expensive
| hardware than Multics.
|
| Yes. It was also less capable. Both of those things were
| design goals of Unix and not of Multics.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > It was a mainframe operating system that only ran on
| high-end hardware. What do you expect?
|
| I expect that by 1975, say, the number of high-end hardware
| installations was a lot more than 80. Multics, even when
| completed, didn't make much of a dent in the world. The
| ideas were influential, used in a number of later OSes, but
| Multics itself didn't go very far.
|
| > Yes. It was also less capable. Both of those things were
| design goals of Unix and not of Multics.
|
| Yes. Multics had the _wrong_ design goals. Arguably, it hit
| them, but that didn 't matter, because they were the wrong
| goals (though not obviously wrong at the time). That's why
| Multics is given short shrift - it successfully implemented
| what turned out in retrospect to be the wrong thing.
|
| Why were they the wrong goals? There were something like
| _600,000_ PDP-11s sold. Sure, Unix didn 't go on all of
| those, and Multics could have run on more than the 80
| machines that it did. Still, that's an _insanely large_
| number of installations that they... not exactly ignored,
| because even the first PDP-11 hadn 't shipped when the
| Multics project began, but at least a huge number of
| machines that they were unable to serve. And of course, as
| always happens in this business, the lower-end machines
| became more and more powerful. The result of that (plus
| easier portability) was that Unix ate the world, and
| Multics became a footnote.
| SeenNotHeard wrote:
| > I expect that by 1975, say, the number of high-end
| hardware installations was a lot more than 80.
|
| Are you sure? Wikipedia notes that for the Cray-1,
| released in 1975, eventually "eighty Cray-1s were sold,
| making it one of the most successful supercomputers in
| history."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1
|
| Yes, yes, there's a difference between high-end
| mainframes and supercomputers, but there's also a
| difference between mainframes and the PDP-11, which is
| better categorized as a minicomputer.
|
| Personally, I find the dismissal of Multics to be less
| about reality and more about the perpetuation of pre-
| existing lore. The Xerox Star and Smalltalk also did not
| fare well in terms of commercial sales, but they tend to
| be lionized in computer history rather than treated as a
| joke.
| somat wrote:
| UNIX is one of whatever MULTICS was many of.
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