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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."
til I can run this under mame?
Do you have ESP?
Now we can comb the source to find all the places where Linux has stolen from MULTICS too. Give SCO a call, they can help out.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
Maybe it had a more magic switch?
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
A beowulf cluster of these bad boys running on emulated hardware running COBOL.NET applications under Mono!
I thought they'd released the source code for Ken Thompson. Neat trick.
I like music
How can MULTICS be called the Father Of Unix? Sure, Multics brought some interesting ideas to the party and qualifies for "Unix's Crazy Uncle MULTICS", but a close genetic connection is hard to see.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Ken Thompson, of course. Multics impregnated him with the ideas, he carried 'em to term and birthed 'em on a PDP-7.
Okay, I really don't want to continue this analogy.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
It might be interesting to see how many of Microsoft's 235 patents are in there as prior art - that is, if they'd tell us which 235 patents they mean.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Calling Unix a "simplified" version of Multics ignores one of the greatest puns in computer history. The name Unix was chosen because it's a castrated version of Multics.
To see the wisdom of ancient masters...
And it's Multivac not MULTIVAC!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3407/The-Last-Question
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
They talked them into releasing it so it would distract us from Linux. Don't fall for it! Don't spend time porting it! Don't even read the code because they probably planted bugs that are so advanced that just 'more sourcefile.c' would infect you and overwrite your bios and install Anna K pr0n!!!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
In the "Dunnet" adventure game built-in to GNU Emacs there is a VAX cabinet. If you find the CPU board and plug it in the thing runs and you can logon to the system and even execute commands. So I think someone skilled in Emacs Lisp (certainly not me) should implement a MULTICS system inside this game also. Given the birthplace of the original Emacs, this would be somewhat ironic.
Or is it a Chuckie Egg problem?
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
Ok... So BSD is what .. a fried egg sandwich? If they had to weep every time they discovered something that ran better than windows on a specialized hardware platform, they would die of dehydration.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
So when are you ponying up the million dollars? That's nearly 20 quid you know. You could buy a nice lunch for that.
You can't buy a nice lunch for 20 quid. In fact, it's completely impossible to buy any food even remotely close to 'nice' in any country that uses 'quid'.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.