October 2009 marked an important milestone in the history of computing. It was exactly 40 years since the first Multics computer system was used for information management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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. Here is a picture gallery of Multics’ history.
I’ve never seen why Multics was so important until now.
The 40th anniversary of Unix link at OSNews just points to a trolling article of why Unix is better. Used less memory. Well of course that is the bias of an anniversary article.
Visicalc invented from the Multics assembler, for eg.
I can see why it went Open Source in 1992, a year after Linux. But I expect that is not the only reason or I may be wrong.
It is strange that no one has commented on this, being a hobbyist blog for alternative OSes.
It isn’t about MS, Apple, Linux, or Psystar. So it’ll get no lovin’
I just noticed this article, actually.
*goes off to read it*
Probably it didn’t go opensource earlier due to copyright issues. It was a hybrid academia-industry project. So a lot of code was owned by comercial entities.
Interesting sidenote: the competing proposal by IBM for the same ARPA project, eventually become the VM OS for their mainframes. Multics enforced security and multiprogramming via a rather baroque set of “privilege” rings. Whereas VM did the same via the concept of virtualization and partitioning. Funny how all these concepts are making it into mainstream OSs 30+ years later.