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."

Comments

oh good

[colourmyeyes]

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.

Re:Emulating the Hardware

[orclevegam]

Surely it's possible, it just may not be much fun or very practical. Unless perhaps that old hardware has some black boxes that talk to spirits or do other magic things.

Maybe it had a more magic switch?

Imagine...

[Unoti]

A beowulf cluster of these bad boys running on emulated hardware running COBOL.NET applications under Mono!

quickly reading the headline

[xrayspx]

I thought they'd released the source code for Ken Thompson. Neat trick.

Re:quickly reading the headline

[xrayspx]

They got MD5Sums with that? I don't want to spend 20 years compiling just to end up building and executing some virus.

Father of Unix?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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.

Re:Father of Unix?

[jefu]

Puns count, but eunuchs don't tend to contribute lots of genetic material themselves.

you can't run it

[meta coder]

Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC it's seem like windows vista

Re:I'm always happy to see something opened, but..

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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.

Not "simplified"

[Blackeagle_Falcon]

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.

Re:Hey Microsoft! Read the source and weep...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Re:emulators?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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'.