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

no systemd ;)

[TheGratefulNet]

maybe its worth looking into..

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:Wonder if my account still works?

[OolimPhon]

Is there a password reset function?

Yes, but your email address has to have UUCP bangs in it :)

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!

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:What can we do with it?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Where did you read that the 360 was so slow it could only handle one user?

This rumor originated in Dr. Gene Amdahl's lesser known history of the IBM mainframe titled, "The Apocryphal Man Mouth," which examined the contradictory cognitive dissonance of software project managers who think that they are running a development process, when, in fact, they are simply running their own mouths. The book is filled with the taller tales of the seminal computer industry, like the instance of Professor Forman Acton of referring to the inventors of that new-fangled language, collectively as, "The FORTRAN Boys."

Apparently, a disgruntled IBM customer complained about about the one user design limitation of OS/360, and asked the IBM sales rep when an upgrade to more than one user would be available. The IBM sales rep pulled out a little plastic case containing resistors, uttered some bizarre incantation like, "Bad Booze Rots Our Young Girls But Vodka Goes Well", and enumerated the prices of the resistors, and how many users each one would support. One cold solder joint later, and the IBM customer was a happy camper.

There was also something in there about Oliver North nearly starting World War Three, because he was forced to use IBM's OrifaceVision/2, which was like their PROFS Professional Office System for mainframes, but it was much more secure, because it was based on OS/2, which meant it never ran or was used at all, and you can't get any more secure than something that just doesn't work . . .

. . . oh, and speaking about IBM SAA AD/Cycle, don't mention that, unless you say "Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman" three times to a mirror, and conclude it with that Islamic curling Eight-ender cry, "Allah Hu Almaraq!", ("God is Gravy!"),

. . . and . . .

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.

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.