[cap-talk] The TCSEC influence on computer security/systems (was: Re: Horton at HotSec...)

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Wed, 2007-07-11 at 12:32 -0700, Jed Donnelley wrote:
> Hmmm.  What would be the point of developing such an OS?  We have had
> many such
> operating systems in the past.  Would running the PDP-1 supervisor, or
> RATS, or NLTSS,
> or KeyKOS, or EROS, or ... on a PC with a full suite of applications
> (at least in the
> case of NLTSS I can say so confidently) make any difference?

While I'm flattered, I think we have to take EROS off of that list. It
never got to the point of having a login prompt and a shell, never mind
applications. RATS, NLTSS, and KeyKOS clearly got that far and further,
but I have an unpleasant hypothesis:

As Jed has suggested, a lot of UNIX mind share was built by more or less
giving UNIX away for non-commercial use. I don't have any knowledge
about RATS or NTLSS, but I *suspect* that no real attempts were made to
make them widely available.

KeyKOS -- or rather Key Logic -- *definitely* suffered from a failure to
understand a basic shift in the market. Taken in context of Moore's law,
workstations were a clear predictor of desktop PCs. No logical leap is
required -- it was a predictable straight-line progression from one to
the other. Tom O'Rourke, who ran Tymshare and later Key Logic, was a
very bright man, but he started in an era of $1M operating systems, and
he was never able to get his head around the idea of a $25 operating
system. Perhaps more importantly, he was unable to internalize the
difference between a small number of major account customers and
building "consumer products."

In 1990 or 1991 we tried to negotiate a KeyKOS license with him. He
wanted a $10,000 royalty per copy. By that time, the UNIX royalty was
somewhere between $5 and $25 depending on volume. Today, of course,
commodity operating systems are free.

I know a little more about product dynamics now than I did then. I'm a
little more sympathetic now, but not a lot more.


I'ld be interested to know more about what happened with RATS and NTLSS.
I speculate that they were initially built for larger or non-commodity
machines and never transitioned to the 386. Was there ever an effort
made to mainstream these operating systems?

shap
-- 
Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph.D.
Managing Director
The EROS Group, LLC