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References: <199507061324.VAA28052@vector.wantree.com.au>
	
Reply-To: jeremy@agency.com
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>>>>> "Rex" == Rex Ballard  writes:

  Rex> Anyone who remembers the original Version 6 Unix, released to
  Rex> educational and research institutions, would barely recognize
  Rex> it when compared to the technology of today (Mach, OSF/1,
  Rex> Linux,...).  Almost everything has changed "under the hood".

  Rex> Unix was an object oriented operating system before anyone even
  Rex> knew what "object oriented" was, look at the device drivers and
  Rex> you can see what spawned what.

  Rex> Threads, OS/9 had them back in 1978.  Also DLLs, Shared Memory,
  Rex> and IPC.  Unix adopted them in 4.3 BSD and SysVR3.  In fact,
  Rex> almost every major innovation in software engineering has
  Rex> either originated from UNIX or has been incorporated.

Do you really believe this? There's a pretty well-known paper in the
operating systems research community by John Ousterhout that addresses
the question: "Why do advances in operating systems design never reach
the commercial sector?"

It is ridiculous to call UNIX object-oriented. It isn't even
close. Device drivers are files; that's the whole abstraction. There's
no inhertiance, no object hierarchy, no component-object model. 

UNIX is hardly an innovator either. If you want to look at truly
innovative operating systems, how about Amoeba or Taos? The basic
design philosophy of UNIX is about 20 years old.

Jeremy
___________________________________________________________________________
Jeremy Hylton                              Electronic publishing consultant  
(summer address)
6474 Scholler Rd.                                         jeremy@agency.com
Kempton PA 19529                                    jeremy@the-tech.mit.edu    
+1 610 756 6386                       http://oasis.ot.com/~jeremy/home.html



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