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50 Years Later, MIT Looks Back At AI and Networking Pioneer Project MAC
v3rgEz (125380) writes "Fifty years ago, a major project that ultimately seeded much of today's computer technology was created at MIT: Project MAC, and the Multics operating system initiative within the project. Daniel Dern interviews some of the key figures involved in the pioneering project, looking at how one laboratory helped spawn Ethernet, AI, and dozens of tech companies and other innovations that took ideas from the lab to the personal computer."
We all know the only reason we have computers and networks is space and NASA. Computers are just not useful for anything else on their own.
So... Mac as in Apple Macintosh or MAC as in Media Access Control? Neither? Then why the fuck isn't it written in the fucking summary?
Unix is not Multics (thus the name) and that is really all you need to know about Multics (except that a generation of MIT hackers cut their teeth in figuring out how to hack it).
Obama seeks to stabilise the economy and readies EO 10-289. Finally something is being done to put these rich capitalist evil men in their place and to raise the wages and living condtitions of the poor. Yes more could be done but this is a good start. This combined with comprehensive immigration reform legislation should put this country back on stable economic footing and make all of us prosperous again. Call Obama and support this directive and tell him to bash these wicked Republicans into submission.
"In the name of the general welfare, to protect the people's security, to achieve full equality and total stability, it is decreed for the duration of the national emergency that:
Point One. All workers, wage earners and employees of any kind whatsoever shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment, under penalty of a term in jail. The penalty shall be determined by the Unification Board, such Board to be appointed by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. All persons reaching the age of twenty-one shall report to the Unification Board, which shall assign them to where, in its opinion, their services will best serve the interests of the nation.
Point Two. All industrial, commercial, manufacturing and business establishments of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth remain in operation, and the owners of such establishments shall not quit nor leave nor retire, nor close, sell or transfer their business, under penalty of the nationalization of their establishment and of any and all of their property.
Point Three. All patents and copyrights, pertaining to any devices, inventions, formulas, processes and works of any nature whatsoever, shall be turned over to the nation as a patriotic emergency gift by means of Gift Certificates to be signed voluntarily by the owners of all such patents and copyrights. The Unification Board shall then license the use of such patents and copyrights to all applicants, equally and without discrimination, for the purpose of eliminating monopolistic practices, discarding obsolete products and making the best available to the whole nation. No trademarks, brand names or copyrighted titles shall be used. Every formerly patented product shall be known by a new name and sold by all manufacturers under the same name, such name to be selected by the Unification Board. All private trademarks and brand names are hereby abolished.
Point Four. No new devices, inventions, products, or goods of any nature whatsoever, not now on the market, shall be produced, invented, manufactured or sold after the date of this directive. The Office of Patents and Copyrights is hereby suspended.
Point Five. Every establishment, concern, corporation or person engaged in production of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth produce the same amount of goods per year as it, they or he produced during the Basic Year, no more and no less. The year to be known as the Basic or Yardstick Year is to be the year ending on the date of this directive. Over or under production shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
Point Six. Every person of any age, sex, class or income, shall henceforth spend the same amount of money on the purchase of goods per year as he or she spent during the Basic Year, no more and no less. Over or under purchasing shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
Point Seven. All wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits, interest rates and forms of income of any nature whatsoever, shall be frozen at their present figures, as of the date of this directive.
Point Eight. All cases arising from and rules not specifically provided for in this directive, shall be settled and determined by the Unification Board, whose decisions will be final."
You want the "forgot to take my meds this morning" thread.
Oh GOSH it would be BLASPHEMY to QUESTION how OTHERS DO IT
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Multics implemented a single level store for data access, discarding the clear distinction between files (called segments in Multics) and process memory. The memory of a process consisted solely of segments which were mapped into its address space. To read or write to them, the process simply used normal CPU instructions, and the operating system took care of making sure that all the modifications were saved to disk. In POSIX terminology, it was as if every file was mmap()ed; however, in Multics there was no concept of process memory, separate from the memory used to hold mapped-in files, as Unix has. All memory in the system was part of some segment, which appeared in the file system; this included the temporary scratch memory of the process, its kernel stack, etc.
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REALLY you might want to pull your head out of the sand you might learn something
Now ever when I hear about Minsky or something which reminds me of him I have to think about this sentence from his Wikipedia page:
In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones.
This is the core idea of all people working in symbolic AI. What a pity...
My truename appears in the list of "Multicians". I still have my copy of The Design of the Multics Operating System.
One of the things that Multics did better than anything since was a feature called dynamic linking. In Multics, linking to a DLL was done via a symbolic reference resolved at runtime, rather than a reference to an ordinal (as in Windows). The Multics file system allowed you to have multiple names on the same file. The combination of those two features resulted in the ability to hot-plug DLLs. Here's how:
1. You have a program which wants to take a sine function. It's got a link to "fortran.lib:sin" (no, the Multics syntax for the entry point was different, but you get the idea).
2. The fortran guru decides he wants to upgrade the fortran library while your program is running.
3. When your program first invoked the sin() function, the symbolic link is resolved to the existing fortran.lib DLL and it's loaded into your pdd (process space).
4. The fortran guru adds the name "fortran.lib_bak" to the existing library file.
5. The fortran guru creates his library as "fortran.lib_new".
6. The fortran guru moves the name "fortran.lib" from the old library to the new one.
7. Immediately, user programs which have not already linked to the old DLL will now link to the new one as symbolic references are encountered and resolved.
8. The fortran guru removes the name "fortran.lib_new" from his new library, which has no effect except to free up that name for use in a future upgrade.
9. Eventually, all user programs which referenced the old library finish and the old library can be deleted. Everyone now uses the new library,
When I first learned about this, I thought is was really cool. 35 years later, I still do.