[55501] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Bell Labs or Microsoft security?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Karrenberg)
Wed Jan 29 19:09:53 2003
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 01:05:12 +0100
From: Daniel Karrenberg <daniel.karrenberg@ripe.net>
To: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Reply-To: /dev/null@reifchen.ripemtg.ripe.net
Mail-Followup-To: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.44.0301290256580.26281-100000@clifden.donelan.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On 29.01 03:32, Sean Donelan wrote:
> ... Multics security. Bell Labs answer: Unix. Who needs all that "extra"
> security junk in Multics. .........
[reader warning: diatribe following]
Gee, there once were a handflul of people;
their principle goal was to make an OS for their own use.
They did it in such a way that it could be developed by its users while
they used it. Creeping featurism was held down successfully, at least
initially ;-(. It ran on platforms orders of magnitude cheaper than
what Multics ran on at the time. It taught a lot of people about
programming style. I hope I learned some things from it. And they
wrote up the shortcomings of the security architecture concisely at the
time this began to matter. They understood stuff that M$ with its
"creeping featurism", "low support cost defaults", "undocumented API of the week"
cannot possibly begin grok and deal with because of ETOOBIG.
Now you and I use it because it does the job better than anything else.
Then you blame them for not designing in today's requirements 30
(not 20!) years ago. Give them a break ...
Daniel
PS: Worm? Virus? Who wrote this up concisely first?
PPS: Plan 9 anyone?
