"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."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-23
PL/I is hardly a difficult language to understand. It's similar to ALGOL in some respects, which eventually led to varieties of Pascal and Modula. Having some knowledge of data languages will help also, but once again, there isn't a whole lot that shouldn't be apparently to those who know C and SQL.
MULTICS was an interesting operating system but it always seemed buggy and unstable. Hopefully, the opening of the source code will help others avoid mistakes with a quick history lesson.
Member since:2005-07-08
Have to agree there, anyone who is even remotely profficient in C should be able to read some PL/1 although it was heading in the Algol direction while C is more transparent to the hardware.
Also before C even arrived on micro computers, Intel had a subset of PM/1 that was probably as close to hardware as C was, it was part of their development systems they sold for 8085 and early 8086 boxes.
The only problem with reading really old software codes esp going way back to 50-60's codes is that the whole way of thinking about machines was in a different context. They were the first to do something or certain ways of doing things were common knowledge then and now forgotten. One has to set aside much of what one knows today to appreciate what was done then.
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.