30 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
30 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
Multics
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/muhltiks/ , n. [from MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service ] An
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early timesharing operating system co-designed by a consortium including
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MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor to CTSS. The design was first
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presented in 1965, planned for operation in 1967, first operational in 1969,
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and took several more years to achieve respectable performance and
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stability. Multics was very innovative for its time among other things, it
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provided a hierarchical file system with access control on individual files
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and introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files.
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It was also the first OS to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the only
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general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating by the NSA (see
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Orange Book ). Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging
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that second-system effect had bloated Multics to the point of practical
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unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in 1972 after buying out GE's
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computer group, but it was never very successful: at its peak in the 1980s,
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there were between 75 and 100 Multics sites, each a multi-million dollar
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mainframe. One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken
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Thompson, and Unix deliberately carried through and extended many of
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Multics' design ideas; indeed, Thompson described the very name Unix as a
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weak pun on Multics. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics
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design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See also
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brain-damaged and GCOS. MIT ended its development association with Multics
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in 1977. Honeywell sold its computer business to Bull in the mid 80s, and
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development on Multics was stopped in 1988. Four Multics sites were known to
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be still in use as late as 1998, but the last one (a Canadian military site)
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was decommissioned in November 2000. There is a Multics page at
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http://www.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/multics.html.
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