40 Years of Multics, 1969-2009

gribll writes "October 2009 marked an important milestone in the history of computing. It was exactly 40 years since the first Multics computer system was used at MIT. The interview is with Multics co-developer, MIT Professor and Turing Award winner Fernando J. Corbato. Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is regarded as the foundation of modern time-sharing systems. Multics was the catalyst for the development of Unix and has been used as a model of operating system design since its release four decades ago. There is also a picture gallery of Multics history."

Re:Um, wasn't bloated Multics the reason *WHY* . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes: the Multics kernel was 250 K (I'm not sure if that's thousand words or thousand bytes, but keep in mind that this was the era of 36-bit words and 9-bit bytes) in 1983. Multicians.org has all the classic legends and misconceptions here: http://multicians.org/myths.html#slow

Re:40 Years of Multics, 1969-2009

[Anonymous Coward]

KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid !

Re:If it was so good

[Darkness404]

Well, for one theres little need and for another there is little interest. The source code for Multics wasn't released till 1992, by then it was clear that UNIX was the future, development basically stopped for Multics long before then and Linux was beginning its rise as an open source UNIX system. With no legacy software to drive a tricky system to emulate why do it? I mean, with game consoles there are the games, with PC things usually there are a few nifty pieces of software, with Multics just about everything was ported to UNIX.

Re:I wish it never died!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're thinking of VMS.

Depending on the languages being interfaced, MULTICS requires the marshaling to be done manually. It wasn't complex code, by any means, but a set of wrapper routines and data translation routines were needed.

Some implementations didn't require that, however. When I used MUTLICS, we wrote our code in a mix of ALM, PL/1, COBOL and FORTRAN. The COBOL and FORTRAN compilers were from the same vendor, and supported immediate interoperability. The PL/1 compiler was from a different vendor, and required us to write very simple bindings.

Re:I wish it never died!

[joebagodonuts]

VMS isn't "friendly to use"? Really? I guess maybe it isn't if English isn't your first language, but what could be more friendly than DCL?
If I need help, I type "help". If I need to copy a file, the command is "copy". If I want to rename a file, guess what the command is? You guessed it - "rename"

Plus, the uptime is tremendous, which is a VERY friendly attribute.

Re:I wish it never died!

[Darinbob]

Hmm, I always considered VMS to be more user friendly, at least to novices, than Unix. Unix was full of cryptic shorthand commands. Ie, "help" vs "man -k", "search" vs "grep", "edit" vs "vi" or "ed" or "ex", etc. DCL was very quick to pick up compared to Unix sh, even though sh had more power.

Essentially I think VMS had a shallow learning curve where Unix was pretty steep, but the shallow curve meant it took you longer to learn how to do really powerful things. The result was that it was faster to become a functional user with VMS, but you got to be a power user more quickly with Unix.