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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Bell Labs or Microsoft security?
On 29.01 03:32, Sean Donelan wrote: > ... Multics security. Bell Labs answer: Unix. Who needs all that "extra" > security junk in Multics. ......... [reader warning: diatribe following] Gee, there once were a handflul of people; their principle goal was to make an OS for their own use. They did it in such a way that it could be developed by its users while they used it. Creeping featurism was held down successfully, at least initially ;-(. It ran on platforms orders of magnitude cheaper than what Multics ran on at the time. It taught a lot of people about programming style. I hope I learned some things from it. And they wrote up the shortcomings of the security architecture concisely at the time this began to matter. They understood stuff that M$ with its "creeping featurism", "low support cost defaults", "undocumented API of the week" cannot possibly begin grok and deal with because of ETOOBIG. Now you and I use it because it does the job better than anything else. Then you blame them for not designing in today's requirements 30 (not 20!) years ago. Give them a break ... Daniel PS: Worm? Virus? Who wrote this up concisely first? PPS: Plan 9 anyone?
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