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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."
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.
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.
While the source code of MULTICS hasn't been Free until now, the internals of the system were well-known. MIT even published a technical introduction. The Free Software community has already realized all of what made MULTICS useful in its own projects, and this opening up of the code, far from revealing something useful to today's hobbyists, is really just for historical study.
A beowulf cluster of these bad boys running on emulated hardware running COBOL.NET applications under Mono!
Btw, it's "Multics" not "MULTICS".
Probably the best source for Multics-related information is this site.
you had me at #!
I thought they'd released the source code for Ken Thompson. Neat trick.
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It seems something to do with the way they implemented dynamic linking. Each executable/data page could be shared between multiple processes, with each process having a different set of permissions on that page. On current systems, the permission codes would be associated with that executable/data page, not the process itself.
Multics - Novel Ideas
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Pretty much the same thing that makes ZX Spectrum software "too complicatded" to run under today's most sophisticated hardware. i.e. it's not meant for that hardware and therefore won't run. Unless you write an emulator first (like one was written for the Spectrum) and run a binary image of the software on that.
:)
But then we need to find a binary image of the software and we only have the source. Is this a chicken and egg problem ?
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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.
I've never messed with a Multics system, but reading the code is facinating for me. Finding out about a dynamically changeable system, where you could plug in drives, CPU"s, and even RAM on the fly, amaazing stuff. In many ways, the design was more innovative than what we have today.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
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
The fact is, Unix was a fresh start, and a damned important one. Unix's creators' biggest accomplishment was clearing out all the feature crud and creating a simple model that has influenced computer science on many levels.
MULTICS, by contrast, was doomed by its own complexity. The fact that Unix was created from the ashes of Bell Labs' participation in the MULTICS project is just a historical accident.
It's MESS you're thinking of, not MAME.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I beg to differ.
At the time of Multics people were just figuring out what a computer should do in an interactive time-sharing environment. People had lots of ideas, and since Multics was, fundamentally, a research OS, they threw them in. Only with experience could they decide which were the good ideas and which were the bad ones. They couldn't know, in advance, which were the winners. They had to try them and see. That is the legacy of Multics.
...laura
> It is not yet known if it will be possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS.
Turing disagrees.
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But what does the compiler run on? It's still a bootstrapping problem unless the PL1 compiler runs on an available architecture.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
Multics requires hardware support for it's security model, probably the dynamic linking, etc.
Certainly, a Multics machine emulator could be written. Such an emulator would run circles around the original hardware. Multics was not written in an era of gigabytes of RAM. So, a Multics emulator could keep an entire emulated machine in RAM on a pocket computer today, like a $99 Palm. Such an emulator might not be hard to write.
-- Stephen.
That block comment appears in virtually every source file. It appears to have been added just for this release.
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There are two hard parts
Adresses and ints were 36 bits, longs were 72, and people used the 8th and 9th bits in in bytes for control and meta bits when manipulating raw terminal input.
Expect most of your problems will be with porting things like bit_offset_ entry (ptr) returns(fixed bin(24)) reducible
--dave (DRBrown.TSDC@HI-Multics.ARPA) c-b
davecb@spamcop.net
Its not an issue, modern hardware is so much faster than the hardware of the MULTICS era an interpreter can emulate the processor and the memory management in one go.
A bigger issue would probably be the 36 bit word but even that is just an efficiency issue. Memory is cheap and MULTICS era machines did not have many Mb.
The bigger question is why go to the trouble. The answer is prior art. MULTICS has been mined as prior art in patent disputes for decades. If its in MULTICS its out of patent.
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Since MULTICS is the father of ALL modern OSes (which would include that trash heap, Windblows) it should provide a multitude of algorithms and processes that people are now trying to Patent and pass off as an Original Invention. This is a very good piece of history. Some people would rather you forget where you came from so they can take advantage of you in the marketplace.
Nope. The I/O hardware that the Level/68 system used was an extremely complex independent beast. (Think of SCSI (small computer systems interconnect) on steroids... since, uhh, Multics wasn't a "small computer system," but quite the opposite.) The documentation that survives is widely scattered; the few (insufficient) pieces that have been scanned and can be found on the web are at bitsavers. Much will likely have to be reverse-engineered.
I've been working on an emulator for a number of years. This article very good news, because it will make it easier for other people to get involved. (Note: don't bother trying to play with the emulator, because it is very... non-functional thus far. If you're interested in helping out, please do read everything at multicians.org, start following alt.os.multics, skim through everything on bitsavers, and then drop me a line *grin*).
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
=OR= we could get someone to develop an FPGA version of the MULTICS system. The machine was big, but today's FPGAs should be able to encapsulate all the hardware services originally available to the system. Certainly there's enough room for the CPU, a controller for a 2MB stick of RAM (though it might need to be larger to support 36-bit words if the chosen RAM is only byte addressable), and an interface to a Flash drive or hard disk. Tack some terminal hardware on the PCB and you're golden.
Never underestimate the modern potential for recreating old hardware.
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Yes, I worked at Pr1me (in R&D) starting in early 1978, and during my interviews it was made quite clear they were designing PRIMOS to become "Multics in a (super-)minicomputer".
I think they already had ("real", not Unix-y) dynamic linking at that point, but only into PRIMOS itself. The ability to create dynamically linked libraries came with the introduction of the Executable Program Format (EPF, a bit like Unix's ELF I assume) in PRIMOS version 19.4, circa 1984.
Other cool things included full-featured signaling/exceptions — full-featured in the sense that a signal handler could re-signal the signal and then pass that new signal "up" the stack to earlier invocations to handle, which was helpful for handling interrupt (^P, akin to Unix ^C) and similar conditions; and recursive "shells", programmed in CPL, which I think stood for Command Procedure Language, which were to PL/1 as Bourne shell and its language was to C in the Unix world in terms of what they were trying to provide.
Oh, and a "transparent" network filesystem was both a blessing (when you really didn't care that the files and directories were remote) and a curse (when you actually did care but couldn't reliably figure it out), implemented initially via a client/server model using the underlying network protocols directly from within the kernel's filesystem and, later, via a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism the kernel offered to itself and to users.
(One of my own little hacks, which became reasonably popular in the R&D data center at least, was to write a SETIME utility that could be run on system startup, and which would query designated remote systems via RPC for their date/time in order to set the local system's date and time, as the hardware back then didn't have its own CMOS-ish clock and the OS wasn't really usable until the local date and time were set.)
I'm not so sure the transparent FS was Multics-inspired, but the folks doing much of the OS design (including CPL, EPF, and so on) definitely included many ex-Multicians who were enthusiastic (to say the least) about recreating their favorite OS features on a system that was selling like hotcakes.
Then there was the guy in Tech Pubs who kept going on about a completely different OS with a wacky name that ran on DEC equipment, had a "shell" (with a "case" statement that he tried to explain to me once), let users connect programs together with "pipes" and, for some weird reason, had all its program names and commands in lower case!! (Wonder whatever happened to that OS...? ;-)
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