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40 Years of Multics, 1969-2009

Posted by timothy on from the before-my-appearance-in-the-womb dept.

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."

2 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Favorite quote by alecto · · Score: 5, Funny

    "In hindsight we might have picked a simpler language than PL/I, . . ." Now there's an understatement!

  2. I wish it never died! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.