[227] in Professors_Quote_Board
Ideas and Information - Managing in a High-Tech World [Arno Penzias]
kerr@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (kerr@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Jun 12 22:01:12 1989
Bell Laboratories was involved in one such effort, an ambitious project
called "Multics" undertaken jointly with General Electric and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As this work progressed, designers
found themselves forced to make the system awkwardly large in order to
meet the various requirements of the participants. While this complexity
dampened much of the earlier enthusiasm for the concept, the project did
lead to a commercially viable system employed by a small but devoted group
of customers until the mid-1980s. In the final analysis, however, Multics'
most lasting impact on computing came from stimulating to Bell Labs
researchers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, to produce a better answer,
which became known as UNIX.
