40 Years of Multics, 1969-2009 138
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* . . (Score:1, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid !
Re:If it was so good (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I wish it never died! (Score:2, Informative)
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! (Score:3, Informative)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
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.