Looking a little further into the shared history of Multics and Unics/Unix
this evening, I found the following text, written by one of the original
participants in the development of Multics, Tom Van Vleck. I thought it was
interesting enough to repeat:

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I was working for MIT in those days, and one thing I did was to organize an
MIT PDP-11 users' group and encourage them to look into UNIX. The idea of a
free, non-vendor-supported operating system was new to them. I invited Dennis
Ritchie to come up and talk to them.

We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code
I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that
stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it
is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot
it.'"

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The complete text is at:

     http://www.multicians.org/unix.html

Wirt Atmar