darrell@sdcsvax.UUCP (03/23/87)
I was hoping someone else from Apollo would make this point, as I'm not much of an expert on OS history. The Apollo Aegis system was very much inspired by Multics. All basic I/O is done via mapping files into the address space of the process doing the I/O. User space routines (in global libraries) take care of turning these mapping primitives into the open/close/read/write that we all know and love. Files are named by UID, so any byte anywhere in the global file system is addressable by a UID/VA pair. There is also a naming server that maps file names to UIDs. The name space is hierarchical, just like Multics. There are other similarities, but we were talking file mapping. Unfortunately, users don't often appreciate what's going on, because the marketing push these days is to make everything look Just Like Unix. But it does make life easier for those of us who have to work on the internals of the system. I hacked Unix kernels for 6 years and wouldn't want to go back to it now. Multics may be dead, but not all of its great ideas were tossed out when Unix came along.