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Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

Back at university one lecture included an infographic about how CPU and operating system features like MMU, increasing register width and the like all started at mainframe-scale installations and trickled down to desktop scale systems and later to handheld devices at a surprisingly consistent pace. It was the time w2k was trying to make NT features mainstream and J2ME arrived on phones. I extrapolated a little and made a joke about multi-user concepts arriving on phones and a few years later Android was right on schedule (when that happened, repurposing Linux users as units of app isolation was the headline feature in tech news).

By that measure, virtualization is long overdue, but I really can't claim that I'm not surprised.

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You can't claim you're not surprised? So you can claim you are surprised? You're surprised by this. I feel like I'm trying to understand double negatation logic in code haha

It's the same as saying "I can't say I'm not surprised"—meaning they are unsurprised.

It seems to me that they're not unsurprised, and so they're actually surprised.

I think that's saying they're surprised. The saying in other contexts: "I can't say I'm not impressed" -> I'm impressed. "I can't say you didn't try" -> you tried.

I think you mean "I can't say I'm surprised" -> this is not at all surprising. But that's just one negative.

And what about ‘I’m not telling nobody’ which means ‘I won’t tell anyone’?

That's a common enough error that it's become well-known slang. People are used to it and can figure out the intended meaning by intonation and context. Although it's still one of those things that can confuse folks who aren't fluent in English.

"I can't say I'm surprised" or "I'm not surprised" would be much clearer here if the intention is to say this is NOT surprising. "I can't say I'm not surprised" is confusing enough that the intention is not clear. Logically it implies surprise.

That's an ironic mistake playing with the idea of negation being additive instead of multiplicative that is enabled by the subtle redundancy encoded in no/any/some.

Makes me wonder if it might be a linguistic eddy echoing from the clash of Germanic and Latin-based French, where negation contracted with the word is also very common (no idea if n'est and friends had been a thing in French at the time that clash happened)

This isn't the first time I've seen a discussion about "double negatives" still being having negative meaning in English.

Last time, someone described how this is quite common, but that the opposite - "double positives" were always positive as there's no negation.

Then someone else replied: "Yeah, right!"

I have difficulties to decipher this as well.

In English, there is a sentence structure like ‘I ain’t telling nobody’, which means ‘I won’t tell anyone’, but for me it’s difficult to decipher as well. Why it’s not like ‘I’m telling nobody’ or ‘I’m not telling anyone’? Why the double negative — ain’t and nobody — means negative as well.

Same issue is here. I don’t understand whether they were surprised or not. I assume they are not surprised. But the difficulty of the phrasing makes me wonder the meaning behind it.

Double (triple, even quadruple) negatives meaning a negative are a common feature of english dialects. They are for emphasis!

It means that I don't feel able to give in to the desire of claiming "told me so"

The multi-user part for Android OS is not an extrapolation, it is inevitable.

Fun facts, Unix name is a joke to Multics, where Multi stands for multi-user, and everyone know what happened soon to Unix single user name indication.

Multics stands for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services (not multi-user).

I don't think UNIX was ever meant to be single-user. This interview suggests that's not where the name came from anyway: https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7035

Since Multics is written for modern or next-generation time-sharing OS at the time hence it must support multi-process and multi-user capability. This capability is represented by the multiplex terminology. In the early days of analog and digital communication, multiplex is the scheme to transmit and receive multi-user information in time or frequency domain.

If you think about it, much of the complexity of Multics come from its multi-user requirement with overly complex access control matrix, multitude of file types including design for multi-user support, etc. Thus the Unix name metaphor or pun is to make it the latter simple by requirement and design. Remember that Unix was started as a skunkwork and even the original PDP-7 that being used originally was donated by other department of AT&T if I remember correctly it was the sound signal processing department [1]. If it is an official project, the multi-user requirement will be there from the start since arguably AT&T is the largest technical company at the time and they will want multi-user from the get-go.

But after some time and considerable success of Unix, the designers probably looks childish due to the naming since they did introduce multi-user at the later stage, and toned down the exact meaning of Unix. What is the opposite of multi, it is uni.

[1] The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-strange-birth-and-long-life-of...

Your reference doesn't claim that the OS was single-user, only that it was developed for a single person (Thompson). There is no evidence that it was ever a single-user system or that it was named after that.

> Because the new operating system supported only one user (Thompson), he saw it as ...

This has a lot more good references too: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10907/was...

My previous reference is for the skunkworks not for multi-user. Since it's a skunkworks project there is no requirement for the OS to have multi-user so basically Ken is free to design the Unix system as simple as he wished. That's why initially Unix is a single user, flat file, etc [1]. It's not only for single user but also only support single task or process initially. This design of original Unix is the antithesis to the Multics (thus the name Unix) and the latter was designed from the start as per requirements as multi-process and multi-user hence the inherent complexity. Ken is still alive today perhaps you should ask him directly about this fact and I've no reason to believe otherwise.

[1] Unix:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

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