Re: Not history, Privilege Levels Below User

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:

That was the next-generation kitchen-sink OS from the latter 1960s that
was taking so long to develop, Bell Labs pulled out of the project and set
about creating their own, much less ambitious OS instead, which they
initially called “UNICS” (to indicate it was the opposite of “MULTICS”).

Bell Labs did indeed give up on Multics, but Unix was an unofficial
skunkworks project and the name is a joke, a castrated Multics.  This
is well documented in many Unix history papers.

On the other hand, if Multics hadn't been so late, and so closely tied
to expensive hardware that wasn't byte addressable and was already
running out of address bits, who knows how much of its other features
might have been more widely adopted. It was pretty cool that you could
write your code one piece at a time, and if you called a routine that
didn't exist, it would stop, you could write and compile the routine,
and then continue the original program.

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