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."

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

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . Thompson and Richie decided to start a less ambitious project, called Unix?

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

[timster]

Yeah, that "was the catalyst" line is great. You can come up with all sorts of equivalent expressions. Like "MS-DOS was the catalyst for Linux", or "horse manure was the catalyst for the automobile"

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

[TheRaven64]

Bloat isn't really the right word. Multics had a lot more features than UNIX, and some really nice ideas (like the fact that files and memory used the same interface), but it required very high-end hardware for the time. It was a mainframe OS. It would not run on a minicomputer and so UNIX was written to port a game from Multics to the spare minicomputer that Thompson and Richie had access to. It turned out that UNIX, while inferior, was good enough for a lot of things, but saying Multics is bloated compared to UNIX is like saying Linux is bloated compared to MS DOS 3.

Re:40 Years of Multics, 1969-2009

[TheRaven64]

Not really. Most of the features of Multics were eventually added to UNIX derivatives, but because they were added piecemeal by various different vendors over the years, they lack the coherence that they had on Multics.

Can you

[SnarfQuest]

Can you really rate it as 40 years, since the last operational site was shut down in 2000? Shouldn't the timer stop when it dies, like with people? Do you give Columbus's age as over 500 years?

Re:obKanye

[Hurricane78]

I don't get it. Kanye is probably the single lamest meme since the beginning of the Internet. And it's a even more lame media "scandal" that "nipplegate". By an order of a magnitude, at least.

Badger badger looks like deep Chinese philosophy, written in the words of Shakespeare, in comparison.

Can we get back to "In Soviet Russia, car is analogy of YOU" jokes, please? :)

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

[Abreu]

It turned out that UNIX, while inferior, was good enough for a lot of things...

It's amazing the number of times in computing where something, while inferior, was good enough for a lot of things and ended up dominating...

Re:obKanye

[R3d M3rcury]

Bah. Unix is just Multics with the balls cut off.

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

[Darinbob]

Linux and BSD are positively bloated compared to the first Unix systems. It first ran on a computer with only 64K after all. Unix wouldn't have survived if it had stuck to the first few versions, it would be far too limiting. What made it succeed, as opposed to its contemporaries, was that it was relatively portable and could migrate to better computers when they came along, and it was relatively open (for the time) so that others could grow and adapt it.

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

[ogdenk]

It was a shameless CP/M knock-off produced by some hole-in-the-wall called Seattle Computer Products. MS bought it for $50,000 and proceeded to destroy the brilliant company known as Digital Research who developed the real thing (CP/M, later DR-DOS). DR also had a better GUI environment than early versions of Windows called GEM. I remember GEM fondly on my Atari ST. Ran it on a 286 for a while too.