From: Justin Voskuhl (justinv_at_microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jan 07 2004 - 16:04:58 PST
In the "UNIX Time-Sharing System" Ritchie and Thompson describe a system
they produced for-programmers by-programmers. It's intended to allow
technically sophisticated users be very productive with their computers,
which is important since these machines, even the "inexpensive" ones
cost many tens of thousands of dollars. They spend a good amount of
time describing the file system they built, with their "everything is a
file" model of things. I noticed their security model is extremely
simple, but good enough for the purposes they describe. One paragraph
on p. 374 in particular struck me as extremely important to the success
of UNIX. They describe essentially the tenets of open source software -
they felt it was important to make the source code of the system
available to the users of the system so that new ideas could be explored
and implemented. Since their system is intended for programmers, this
makes lots of sense. I see that their reliability information today
would be considered terrible. They don't appear to really understand
why their system fails. They claim it's due to various hardware
failures but I wonder how much they really understand about the system
crashes they experience.
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