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

Wonder if my account still works?

[sk999]

I had a Multics account way back - used it solve problem sets in Physical Chemistry. It would be cool to resurrect my account, but I don't remember the password. Is there a password reset function?

Re:What can we do with it?

[Gay Boner Sex]

History. Read. Learn from the past. General concepts and themes do not change.

Multics didn't have many "problems," or at least many more than other systems of the time. (the IBM TSS/360, in 1967, turned out to be too slow for supporting more than one user concurrently, and of course OS/360 was plagued with bugs and performance problems). There is a common myth that Multics "failed," but in fact the system was first described in 1965, released in the early 1970s, and lasted until 2000 (Salus himself said, "With Multics they tried to have a much more versatile and flexible operating system, and it failed miserably."). However, the lifespan, in particular the thirteen years after development ceased in which installations continued to use it, doesn't suggest failure. It's certainly true that AT&T management decided that the project wasn't relevant to them, and that's sufficient for Unix history.

Bam!

Multics

[Tom]

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."

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.