- Image by Martin Jansen via Flickr
If you have ever heard of Multics (the operating system which paved the way for networking and especially UNIX architecture), you might be aware that it originally had nine goals. Its creators, Corbato and Vyssotsky, listed out these goals in a paper they published back in 1965, along with a great deal of elaboration. One of the chief goals among this list was that Multics should always be easily accessible through remote terminals. The main reason why you always need to be able to access your network through a remote terminal is the flexibility such a setup provides you with. And when they published this concept, that computers could be networked so that any terminal might be able to access the operating system, they essentially conceived of the Internet decades before it hit the rest of the world — and four years before Woodstock.
Having your operating system be accessible to someone who is using a remote (and by extension, potentially far away) terminal is extremely useful in that it eliminates the need to have things stored on individual machines. When the operating system can reach out to any computer, it allows the storage capacity of a larger hard drive and the power of a mighty processor to come together and grant these benefits even to people who may be nowhere near the computer whose abilities they may be accessing.
As well, you need to consider that having access to the operating system (and all of the benefits that such a computer might grant) also gives the user the ability to be flexible with their machines. While it might sound a little bit “hippie” to say it, it is crucial to not be tied to a single machine (which automatically sets up a sort of confinement), which could fail at any moment. Since computer hardware has always had some flakiness about it, this is a great way to continue your work, no matter what.
