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MIT Releases the Source of MULTICS, Father of UNIX
mlauzon writes "Extraordinary news for computer scientists and the Open Source community was announced over the weekend, as the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened. Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a 'simplified' successor to MULTICS. The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000. From now on, MULTICS can be downloaded from an official MIT site (it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in 2000, including the PL/1 compiler). Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC, as MULTICS requires dedicated hardware, and there's no operational computer system today that could run this OS. Nevertheless the software should be considered to be an outstanding source for computer research and scientists. It is not yet known if it will be possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS."
Karma whoring, indeed ...
Had you compiled Linux in the past 5 years, you might have noticed that it can do just that on suitable hardware.
I'm certainly not giving people $1,000,000 for an imaginary machine. Real men make claims about real computers with real resources, not imaginary ones.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.