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Aucbvax.2058 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!Barns@OFFICE Fri Jul 3 07:47:50 1981 Storage Question Restated Now that half the Multics users in the world have voiced their displeasure, let me try to say what I was really trying to say before, hopefully in a less offensive manner:

During the time period when Multics was born, that system and others made varying uses of the idea of a single level store. Naturally different people came up with different hardware/software approaches and solved different subsets of the universe of possible situations. Since then we have had Tenex and Unix which have made their own contributions, and also some steps backward because of the desire to make something that doesn't chew up a disproportionate share of a timesharing system's time. (Yes, many others too, but Tenex and Unix are perhaps best known.) More recently the S/38 has attempted to go back to some of the more general ideas, which is noteworthy in that it is not such an enormous processor, nor is it intended to be a timesharing system of the flavor of Multics or Tenex or Unix. Unfortunately there are also many unfortunate things about the 38 as now packaged - notably the lack of programming languages that many of us like to use, or reasonable substitutes.

Now it is my impression (unsupported by hard data) that the 38's processor is more or less in the same ballpark as (some of) the workstation processors. This suggests that it is not unreasonable for someone who has a mind to, to make a programming environment on these machines, or ones like them, which will give us a simple means of accessing data for the purpose of local computation by the 'owner' of the workstation and only apply restrictions on access to people elsewhere in a network. I suggest that in the nicest form, this means that the workstation's programs access things by an n-bit number which is absolute for the whole workstation. This need not mean that no other form of accessing can exist.

The question, then, is, What such things exist or are planned? To date the responses indicate that the Lisp Machine has such an organization and that the Perq will at some future date have a virtual storage box to support such things at the firmware level. Dan Lynch's message of sometime back suggests that the STAR does its storage paging in a nasty way, not clean at all, but details seem to be unknown outside Xerox. Anybody know any more?

--Bill Barns -------

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