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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."
"In hindsight we might have picked a simpler language than PL/I, . . ." Now there's an understatement!
I have a fellow in my office who cannot seem to stop talking about punch cards, he also has a dilbert cartoon for it. Life has changed so much with the advent of computers, especially the desktop PC's / MACs
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Hey Multics, I'm really happy for ya, and imma let you finish, but UNIX is the best multiuser operating system of ALL TIME. OF. ALL. TIME.
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Multiple Useless Large Tables In Core Simultaneously.
I had to use it at a large energy company in Europe in the 1980s. It was actually a fantastic system.
Unlike VMS and IBM's mainframe OSes, it was actually pretty friendly to use. This attribute has clearly rubbed off on UNIX. While we'd spend months teaching some users how to use VMS, they'd get Multics within a few days.
The programming environment was also fantastic. It didn't support as many languages as VMS, nor did it have language interoperability that was as good, but it still supported more languages than you'd fine on typical UNIX systems of that era.
That said, it still was a beast compared to UNIX. UNIX was sly and sleek, and thus supported lower-end hardware better than Multics could. And UNIX was more portable, which eventually made it more widely available.
Still, I look upon my Multics days with a fondness I didn't find again until the early 2000s, when I was able to get a position administering a network of FreeBSD servers.
. . . Thompson and Richie decided to start a less ambitious project, called Unix?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Unix (Eunuchs) is the castrated version of Multics.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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"
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Coincidence ? I think not!
Multics was very influential, it provided Ken Thompson an example of what not to do. In other words, stick closely to the KISS (Keep It Simple) principle.
That and they like what Multics offered but didn't have the hardware to support it.
Of course the Current version of Linux or BSD is probably more "bloated" then the last version of Multics.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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When I worked at the Pentagon (HQAF DSC) one of the machines I developed on was a Multics machine. The really interesting part of the architecture to me was that it had, if I recall correctly, seven permission rings from ring 6 to ring 0 and each were implemented in hardware. The OS ran on a separate processor cluster for each ring, and system level work (kernel mode) was done all in ring 0.
I enjoyed learning PL1, and found it to be an easy transition to go to Unix/C. The multics box was a beast, and stuff ran like greased lightning.
and they waited until november to tell you!
Yes: the Multics kernel was 250 K (I'm not sure if that's thousand words or thousand bytes, but keep in mind that this was the era of 36-bit words and 9-bit bytes) in 1983. Multicians.org has all the classic legends and misconceptions here: http://multicians.org/myths.html#slow
It's true that Multics couldn't get out of its own way on a system with 64K of RAM, although it was technically supposed to run on that configuration. To work well, it really wanted several hundred K of RAM. Thank heavens we left it in the dustbin of history, replaced by the crisp, clean efficiency of Windows, or OS X, or Linux.
So I've got to ask, does this have any synchronic significance with the recent 40-year anniversary of Sesame Street recently splashed around Google's main page?
Hmm... "This episode brought to you by the letters P, L, and I, and the number pi!" :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The moon landing, the Internet, Multics, and lots of other things.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If it was so good, then why aren't there any emulators for it? Nearly every other old system has emulators, but not Multics.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
That is 250K SLOC. SLOC stands for Significant lines of code. Heck I have seen applications that rival that. Multics was small and looks pretty light. To bad it was impossible to have written it in c instead of PL/1. Had it been in c it might still be around and useful.
Multics predates c BTW so it couldn't have been written in c. It could have been ported maybe but by then we had Unix.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Good thing they didn't call it Unics or it would've been the butt of jokes for decades.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have a feeling that this "feature" got removed very soon after it snarfed the Computer Unit Director's screen.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Horse manure is not a catalytic converter for automobile. That's just pure horseshit.
I remember reading that Multics was going to be the OS used to provide computing-as-utility; everyone was just going to be able to use it. Did this plan ever pan out (was Tymnet and Telenet Multics-based?) Who, then, were the Multics customers and what, if anything, spawned from it (other than Unix and VisiCalc, as mentioned in TFA)?
Later in his career Ken Thompson had corrective eye surgery, changed his name to Kim Thayil and was the lead guitarist of Soundgarden...What an amazing talent.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
That was horrible. Seriously. Stop trying.
indeed,
This episode of Multics was brought to you by the letters P and L and the number 1
Yes... That is what a Coincidence is. When 2 things that seem to have a connection while they don't
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As Roger Needham quipped, Multics was design for the real-time processes of geological processes.
...came first.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I still miss the clean user interface (all command-line arguments meant the same thing, no matter which command was being executed) and fine documentation. But the GE645 / Honeywell 6800 architecture was never well-enough documented to make emulation feasible. And the descendants of Multics have implemented most of the features more-or-less. The world has moved on.
I've moved on, too. In 1978 I taught myself C; I've since learned and continue to program in C++, Java and Python, having discarded along the way Lisp, Pascal and Delphi.
And I use Windows mostly now. But my memory tells me that Multics was often faster for routine things like searching the file system. (Though the filesystem back then was only a few hundred MB.) And the processor back then was good for about 1 MIPS. Forget about color graphics. Animation? That was for cartoonists.
Anyway, this old-timer got a chuckle out of the article; thanks for posting the heads-up.
Don't forget the segmentation that was introduced with the 286's protected mode was influenced by Multics as well.
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...
No sig for the moment.
"horse manure was the catalyst for the automobile"
Just because it couldn't be more off-topic, The Horse & the Urban Environment describes this relationship quite well.
Stop arguing with myself!
Of course the Current version of Linux or BSD is probably more "bloated" then the last version of Multics.
Sure, trade in a 40 year old operating system for two 20s, just because its a little bloated after giving you the best years of its life... Does this tty driver make my kernel look fat?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I'm surprised to see the lack of comp.risks here in the comments. Multics was a phenomenally well designed OS from a security perspective. So much so that NSA recruiters at college took an interest in you if you had Multics experience...
I was first introduced to Multics in 1984 as a freshman at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette). I was lucky, I had a PC (a Kaypro 4) and a fancy new 1200 baud modem for dialing into the system. So I didn't have to wait in line in the terminal room for seat at one of the TVI terminals. With only experience with CP/M, Multics was a real eye-opener. It was an awesome system and had many features that I still miss today.
While there I was privledged to know a fine Multician, James Dugal. His name is sprinkled throughout Multics lore. I was proud to call him friend. He is missed.
Johnie Stafford
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...
It's a demonstrable effect in most industries really. McDonald's is a perfect example. "Good enough" seems to be the sweet spot for garnering mass appeal.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06/07/1619231/Unix-Turns-40?from=rss
Holy happy hippy crap!
Hey whats wrong with getting a trophy OS. You know an OS can never be too thin or too new :)
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Like many other posters, I too was a Multician at university. It rocked. But I prefer my nice GUI and not having to share my processor with others!
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Actually there were not really any "bytes" at all, as in addressable units smaller than the 36-bit word.
Various software would store ASCII in the words in different ways, using 6x6, 7x5, or 4x9 bits for them.
Dr. Corbato
nt
Man, you just solved the fuel crisis.
Corbato designed and taught the Architecture that underpinned the UNIX developers and Martin Richards (of Cambridge UK) later, in 1970, brought BCPL, evolving into B, C, ... (_but_ definitely not C++)
Professor Corbato got so many things right on the GE645 that he, Gordon Bell, Maurice Wilks and Tom Kilburn were the generation of _REAL_ uber-architects in the 60/70 s; with Gene Ahmdahl and Fred Brooks doing the engineering heavy lifting, Chris Streachy and and the MIT school (Marvin Minsky and many others) did the philosophy.
Without their contributions the Computer Industry would never have started
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.
TECO is fine, and VIM is almost as good if you know, and enable Perl.
but remember, "BLISS is IGNORANCE" all those '.' s, Duh! PDP-10 Algol was written in BLISS by Wolf from CMU,
and reading it made the head hurt.
A final thought, why can not manufacturers write working assemblers, and more linkers for their platform,
all the industry stuff, except the PDP-10 assembler (aka MASM in modern terms) and all manufacturer linkers
have been crap!
BTW the reason C was a mess is that Ken Olsen's brother wanted it so; an earlier Balmer style
interoperability Canute!
Come on, MS-DOS was the best operating system MicroSoft ever produced!
I don't therefore I'm not.
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.
"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..."
And it's also amazing the number of times that "inferior but good enough" product, after dominating the low-end field due to its small and lightweight design, then has to scale up by painfully and clumsily reintroducing all the "bloated" features of the higher quality and better-designed product. And then of course, makes the better product extinct not on its own merits, but because it's dragged a social and aftermarket ecosystem (often one designed purely to patch its flaws) up with it.
Case in point: virtualization. In the 1970s, IBM mainframes had VM. The PCs laughed at the mainframes and slowly took over. Now, we're reinventing all that mainframe virtualization tech... and putting it over the top of Windows, which is still DOS- and 80x86 compatible. Meanwhile, even the IBM 360 had invented fully virtualized, hardware-independent instruction sets... but in the bold new Wintel data centre world, we have emulated x86, an instruction set not at all designed for portability.
It was probably IBM's fault for being so tightly protective of their IP and not realising that they could possibly be out-competed by the descendants of the micros - but we haven't necessarily ended up with a better solution, in the long run, by reinventing the mainframe the long and hard and clumsy way.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I was in the used computer business in the early 70s and bought the 645 that was at Bell Labs. still have a bunch of circuit boards from it
I will be putting them up for sale soon....
Bill
cool story, bro. full of WIN!!! but /. needs to be moar facebookable these days. images don't show up anymore when posting linkages... :-(((
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
It would run in less than 64KB. I had it running on a 28KW (16 bit) machine. It is also worth pointing out that at the same time DEC had an operating system for Real-Time computing and one for timesharing - both running in 28KW on PDP-11's and there was TOPS-10 running on the PDP-10 with 256K.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Mini-meme alert: There fixed that for you. QDOS
Camping on quad since 1996.
I used Multics in the eary 80s at the INRIA, it was incredibly slow... awfully complex, the documentation took severall large cabinets..
And compared to the Onyx (an early Z8000 based Unix machine) "unexiting"...
But I confess a strong nostalgy second only to "ernie covax" (4.0/4.1 Bsd) for the system, the greenberg emacs implementation was an work of art and using algol 68 an experience in alternate reality...
And looking backward, is was a "small" operating system "only 1,5 million lines" of PL/1 and 400K lines of assembly code" (vs about 40K for Unix V7) (of course this was before X11, wysiwyg editing etc...
Here is to you Multics, cheers !
And still the best operating system MicroSoft ever produced!
I don't therefore I'm not.
A little late for replying, but anyway...
You can even go further back in time : the concept of channels for IO processing separate from the CPU is still no standard in the x86 world. The fact that IO speed is still a bottleneck is still not recognised. Instead faster processors are pushed, but never matched with better IO.