Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 12th Nov 2007 16:44 UTC, submitted by Oliver
"This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists and the Open Source community: the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened [get it here]. Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a 'simplified' successor to MULTICS (the name 'Unix' is itself a hack on 'Multics'). The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
It will be a very, very rare person, OS hobbyist or not, who is willing to learn PL/1 just to be able to read the sources for MULTICS.