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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