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Since Unix was written as an effort to recapture the good parts of Multics after Bell Labs pulled out, and the people working on Unix for the first several years had also been working on Multics before that, I don't think Multics is a good example of "Basic concepts were painstaking reinvented and re-engineered all the time under different circumstances. … die in isolation and obscurity, whose architectures left no influence." The people who worked on Unix for its first decade were intimately familiar with Multics, and Multics was well-documented publicly at the time, unlike certain other systems from the 01960s. The research literature in subsequent years frequently compared and contrasted systems designs with Multics's design. Even some of the Multics features that weren't in Unix in its first decade, like ACLs, memory-mapped files, process accounting, shared libraries, and SMP support, got added to Unix later. All this is to say that, to the extent that later systems rejected Multics's design decisions, they did it consciously, not out of ignorance. It's easy to look back at the things Multics attempted, like strong security, and believe that it achieved them, and consequently that more recent systems designs represent backsliding. In many cases, though (like that one!) it did not, and later systems designs solve unanticipated problems that arose from the Multics design choices. A lot of DSP, speech codec, and even TCP/IP work in later decades was guided by NSA people who were familiar with the SIGSALY history, even if they didn't tell the uncleared people they were working with. See https://ee.stanford.edu/~gray/lpcip/ for a detailed history of speech protocols. In other cases, like the DES, the NSA people deliberately sabotaged the resulting work. I do agree that preserving historical materials is important. |