Being file based is very much in MIT Lisp DNA, certainly MACLISP and the CADR MIT Lisp Machine. (Re-)Building from scratch from files and saving out an image for faster loading times (or resaving an image with your project's stable files), vs. the Smalltalk working on an image once you get one going.
The single address space OS was well known from Multics, but I think would have been too much additional work for the developers, and running such a system with the much less reliable hardware of those days required a lot of tape backup, e.g. MIT-Multics would back up any dirty segment (file) after ~1/2 an hour, which of course required 24x7 operator staffing, that sort of Information Utility thing wasn't really in this group's DNA.
The Incompatiable Time Shareing System (ITS) was in fact named in humorous opposition to the Multics predecessor, the Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS), the latter was xompatible with batch, those jobs would soak up any spare cycles if possible, which was a big deal back then. ITS instead had features where you could pretty much take over the machine for a robotics experiment or demo, that sort of resource allocation was handled socially, and such features were hidden by obscurity and a sort of apprenticeship system, instead of being enforced by the OS.
The single address space OS was well known from Multics, but I think would have been too much additional work for the developers, and running such a system with the much less reliable hardware of those days required a lot of tape backup, e.g. MIT-Multics would back up any dirty segment (file) after ~1/2 an hour, which of course required 24x7 operator staffing, that sort of Information Utility thing wasn't really in this group's DNA.
The Incompatiable Time Shareing System (ITS) was in fact named in humorous opposition to the Multics predecessor, the Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS), the latter was xompatible with batch, those jobs would soak up any spare cycles if possible, which was a big deal back then. ITS instead had features where you could pretty much take over the machine for a robotics experiment or demo, that sort of resource allocation was handled socially, and such features were hidden by obscurity and a sort of apprenticeship system, instead of being enforced by the OS.