
The Evolution of Operating Systems (2000) [pdf] - rspivak
http://www.brinch-hansen.net/papers/2001b.pdf
======
ArtWomb
This stuff is really rare. And the reason why is explicated in a quote in the
batch systems section:

 _First, these systems were "obvious" and could be understood in minutes from
reading a manual. Second, there were very few different kinds of computers,
and the community of system programmers was similarly small. At least in the
United States, almost everyone who wanted to know about these systems could
and did communicate directly with their authors._

One gets the sense that few anticipated there would one day be a computer in
every home ;)

~~~
ianai
The paper dates from the time right as the PC was becoming affordable, too. A
version for the following 20 years would be interesting. Ie the last 18 years
and what’s likely to come in the next 2. If the economy tanks, then the OS
landscape will probably stagnate. And we’ll probably see the first exascale
supercomputers.

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gnufx
This talks about good reliability of the RC 4000 software. I used an RC 4000
-- which seemed pretty steam-driven in the '80s -- and the immortalized phrase
quite heard often enough from our Danish colleagues was "Ze compuder ish all
schrewed upp". (Pardon the accent.) As far as I remember that was typically
software rather than hardware, and I wonder why the discrepancy.

Anyhow, back home, our GEC 4000s¹ were fast and pretty reliable, running the
OS4000 operating system. I've never confirmed it, but I assume "4000" was a
tribute to RC 4000, given its similar software design and terminology, though
Nucleus, (the moral equivalent of?) the microkernel, was in hardware/firmware.
It's an interesting counterpoint to the RC 4000 monitor generally described as
slow. As the GEC 4000 architecture was later emulated decently fast on
M88000s, the speed wasn't just down to the original hardware; such 1970s
microkernel-ish designs could work well. Skål PBH.

1,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC_4000_series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC_4000_series)

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nickpsecurity
Although I loved this paper, he isn't fair to MULTICS in it. MULTICS had a
nice, feature set:

[http://multicians.org/features.html](http://multicians.org/features.html)

After Karger et al pentested it...

[https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-
multics.pdf](https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf)

...it also got a security upgrade. Its security profile was stronger than most
other OS's. Although mostly a flop, its combo of features and security did
cause some organizations to buy it. The last one shut down in year 2000. It
was just too expensive ($7+ mil?) to justify in a market that, at the time,
mostly cared about performance per dollar with security and maintenance
activities a non-concern. On other hand, Burroughs B5000 and System/38 (later
AS/400) were reliability/maintainability-focused products from that era that
did manage to survive to present day.

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rurban
A classical worse is better.

What I liked to see in updates are secure and fast microkernels (L3,L4) and
secure nonblocking parallelism (Singularity) in a secure language.

~~~
PeCaN
I think you'd really enjoy Joe Duffy's Midori blogs then
[http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-
midori/](http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/)

~~~
rurban
Sure, that's what I meant.

