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:
2007-02-22
My comp sci professors are going to flip, I know -- we've had to study it before. (EDIT: Especially the two professors who still know PL/1.)
They have a license (MIT-style, natch), but I think it's best to consider it shared source, not open source, as a curtosy for donating this for history.
I wonder how long it'll be before we can run this on an emulator of some sort...?
Edited 2007-11-12 17:36 UTC