DistOS 2014W Lecture 7
Project
We discussed moving the proposal due date back a week. We also discussed spending the class prior to that date discussing the primary papers people had chosen in order to provide preliminary feedback. Anil spent some time going through the papers from OSDI12 and discussing which ones would make good projects and why.
- Pick a primary paper.
- Find papers that cite that paper, papers it cites, etc. to collect a body of related work.
- Don't just give a history, tell a story!
Unix and Plan 9
UNIX was built as "a castrated version of Multix", which was a very complex system. Multix was, arguably, so far ahead of its time that we are only just achieving their ambitions now. Unix was much more modest, and therefore much more achievable and successful. Just enough infrastructure to avoid reinventing the wheel. Just a couple of programmers making something for their own use. Unix was not designed as product or commercial entity at all. It was licensed out because AT&T was under severe antitrust scrutiny at the time.
They wanted few, simple abstractions so they made everything a file. Berkeley promptly broke this abstraction by introducing sockets for networking. Plan 9 finally introduced networking using the right abstractions, but was too late.