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To: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>
cc: witr@rwwa.com, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: your mail 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 28 Jul 1995 14:15:07 PDT."
             <199507282115.OAA02492@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> 
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 14:23:06 -0700
Message-ID: <9072.806966586@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> Can you tell me what you thing of Apollo Aegis (aka Domain/OS) typed
> file objects with type managers?  Would you consider that an elegant
> solution to the ``abortion'' we call a file system based design?

Yes, I would say that Aegis was considerably closer to my idea of
"ideal" in many ways.  In fact, Apollo was so far ahead of their time
in so many respects that it makes me a little sad to sometimes when I
think of their demise (or assimilation might be a better word).

Easy clustering, *practical* extensions to the filesystem, like the
variant symlinks I'm always harping about (made things like I18N or
multi-architecture support SOOOO much easier!), even the GUI had some
nice features..  I used to watch the serious Apollo hacks just flying
along, cutting and pasting command lines and editing their histories
and such..  A lot more integration between system and GUI than you get
with X..

> The very first implementation of NFS on apollo was a file type manager,
> so you can do some mighty powerful things with it.  NFS was later pushed
> into the kernel, but the code was not changed drastically until SR10.3.

Yep.  We could all learn a lot from Apollo, but it's an unfortunate
fact that the UNIX hacks were always a little jealous of its features
and the Apollo hacks themselves were too arrogant to "sell" them
properly, so the combination of the two ended up sparking something of
a war between UNIX/X and Domain, and when UNIX "won" the victors
wrongly assumed that it was because the Apollo propeller-heads were
inferior in every way and history was re-written to shut them out.

Sad sad!

					Jordan