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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!
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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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?
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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.
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.
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!
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."
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.
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
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.
indeed,
This episode of Multics was brought to you by the letters P and L and the number 1
As Roger Needham quipped, Multics was design for the real-time processes of geological processes.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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