It Can Be Done (2003)

The late André Bensoussan worked with me on the Multics operating system at Honeywell in Cambridge. We were working on a major change to the file system, which required a subsystem, the VTOC manager, to manage file description information. It had to transport the file information between disk and memory, manage a shared memory buffer pool, and manage space on disk for the information. In other words, it was a small virtual memory manager. Ré took on the job of design, implementation, and test of the VTOC manager. Finally André took his neat final pencil copy to a terminal and typed the whole program in. The VTOC manager worked perfectly from then on.