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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."
Well, for one theres little need and for another there is little interest. The source code for Multics wasn't released till 1992, by then it was clear that UNIX was the future, development basically stopped for Multics long before then and Linux was beginning its rise as an open source UNIX system. With no legacy software to drive a tricky system to emulate why do it? I mean, with game consoles there are the games, with PC things usually there are a few nifty pieces of software, with Multics just about everything was ported to UNIX.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hmm, I always considered VMS to be more user friendly, at least to novices, than Unix. Unix was full of cryptic shorthand commands. Ie, "help" vs "man -k", "search" vs "grep", "edit" vs "vi" or "ed" or "ex", etc. DCL was very quick to pick up compared to Unix sh, even though sh had more power.
Essentially I think VMS had a shallow learning curve where Unix was pretty steep, but the shallow curve meant it took you longer to learn how to do really powerful things. The result was that it was faster to become a functional user with VMS, but you got to be a power user more quickly with Unix.