48-Year-Old Multics Operating System Resurrected (multicians.org)

"The seminal operating system Multics has been reborn," writes Slashdot reader doon386: The last native Multics system was shut down in 2000. After more than a dozen years in hibernation a simulator for the Honeywell DPS-8/M CPU was finally realized and, consequently, Multics found new life... Along with the simulator an accompanying new release of Multics -- MR12.6 -- has been created and made available. MR12.6 contains many bug and Y2K fixes and allows Multics to run in a post-Y2K, internet-enabled world.
Besides supporting dates in the 21st century, it offers mail and send_message functionality, and can even simulate tape and disk I/O. (And yes, someone has already installed Multics on a Raspberry Pi.) Version 1.0 of the simulator was released Saturday, and Multicians.org is offering a complete QuickStart installation package with software, compilers, install scripts, and several initial projects (including SysDaemon, SysAdmin, and Daemon). Plus there's also useful Wiki documents about how to get started, noting that Multics emulation runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Raspian systems.

The original submission points out that "This revival of Multics allows hobbyists, researchers and students the chance to experience first hand the system that inspired UNIX."

Comments

Still

[ArchieBunker]

a more capable operating system than HURD.

Re:What can we do with it?

[Gay Boner Sex]

Where did I read?

Market research at Digital by walking up to someone ELSE'S mainframe and waiting for it to do another "load in the washing machine" before it would even think about giving you the time of day and sniff your card stack.

I used it at MIT in the early 80s.

[www.sorehands.com]

I was a project administrator on Multics for my students at MIT. It was a little too powerful for students, but I was able to lock it down. Once I had access to the source code for the basic subsystem (in PL/1) I was able to make it much easier to use. But it was still command line based.

A command line, emails, and troff. Who needed anything else?

Re:Multics

[tlhIngan]

More importantly: To take some of the things that Multics did better and port them to Unix-like systems. Much of the secure system design, for example, was dumped from early Unix systems and was then later glued back on in pieces.

Basically Multics gave way to the rise in minicomputers who could not handle such a heavy OS, so the developers created Unix ("Multics without balls" - a play on Eunuchs). One thing they did was if there was every a problem, you called panic(). Aka, the kernel panic on Unix. Much simpler and much lighter than trying to recover (though modern Linux is pretty hard to panic() without failing hardware - it has enough built-in self checks that in general it'll handle misbehaving kernel drivers).

There's also historical interest - don't you want to see what the predecessor to Unix and C was? Unix was popular because it was a lightweight OS at the time that was multiuser and multiprocessing, a change from CP/M and DOS. It's why people run emulators of the Apollo Guidance Computer with the original software. It's neat, it's interesting.

Influence on Unix

[nuckfuts]

From here...

The design and features of Multics greatly influenced the Unix operating system, which was originally written by two Multics programmers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Superficial influence of Multics on Unix is evident in many areas, including the naming of some commands. But the internal design philosophy was quite different, focusing on keeping the system small and simple, and so correcting some deficiencies of Multics because of its high resource demands on the limited computer hardware of the time.

The name Unix (originally Unics) is itself a pun on Multics. The U in Unix is rumored to stand for uniplexed as opposed to the multiplexed of Multics, further underscoring the designers' rejections of Multics' complexity in favor of a more straightforward and workable approach for smaller computers. (Garfinkel and Abelson[18] cite an alternative origin: Peter Neumann at Bell Labs, watching a demonstration of the prototype, suggested the name/pun UNICS (pronounced "Eunuchs"), as a "castrated Multics", although Dennis Ritchie is claimed to have denied this.)

Ken Thompson, in a transcribed 2007 interview with Peter Seibel[20] refers to Multics as "...overdesigned and overbuilt and over everything. It was close to unusable. They (i.e., Massachusetts Institute of Technology) still claim it’s a monstrous success, but it just clearly wasn't." He admits, however, that "the things that I liked enough (about Multics) to actually take were the hierarchical file system and the shell—a separate process that you can replace with some other process."