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OK, let's take this in some more context: > To the Labs computing community as a whole, the problem was the increasing obviousness of the failure of Multics to

by msla 3y ago

OK, let's take this in some more context: > To the Labs computing community as a whole, the problem was the increasing obviousness of the failure of Multics to deliver promptly any sort of usable system, let alone the panacea envisioned earlier. What was Multics? One core animating idea of Multics was the "Computer Utility" concept, or centralized mainframe-based computing as a utility as reliable and available as water and power: https://multicians.org/fjcc1.html https://multicians.org/fjcc1.html > One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility. Such systems must run continuously and reliably 7 days a week, 24 hours a day in a way similar to telephone or power systems, and must be capable of meeting wide service demands: from multiple man-machine interaction to the sequential processing of absentee-user jobs; from the use of the system with dedicated languages and subsystems to the programming of the system itself; and from centralized bulk card, tape, and printer facilities to remotely located terminals. Such information processing and communication systems are believed to be essential for the future growth of computer use in business, in industry, in government and in scientific laboratories as well as stimulating applications which would be otherwise undone. -- "Introduction and Overview of the Multics System", F. J. Corbató (MIT) and V. A. Vyssotsky (Bell Labs) This was an ambitious project and it took some time to achieve. Work on Multics started in 1965 and Multics was first used for paying customers in October of 1969, six months after Bell Labs dropped out and work on Unix began. https://multicians.org/chrono.html https://multicians.org/chrono.html So did Multics deliver "promptly"? Probably not, but four years for an ambitious project isn't so bad, and it took Unix six years (until 1975) to get to Sixth Edition, the first version of Research Unix used much outside of Bell Labs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_6_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_6_Unix My point is that Multics is given short shrift by this history, which is understandable because it's about a completely different OS, but it's painted as a failure that was stalled in development for an inordinate amount of time. It wasn't a failure, as it was used commercially until 2000, and whether it was inordinately slow in coming is impossible to fairly judge because it was, in most respects, the first of its kind, in that it was the first "complete" OS with what we'd now consider the full complement of functionality.

cafard 3y ago
Multics influenced a number of minicomputer OSes of the 1970s. I never used PRIMEOS, but have heard it described as a smaller version of Multics. I did use Data General's AOS/VS, and that had been influenced by Multics--so I suppose that its predecessor AOS also had been.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  I never used PRIMEOS, but have heard it described as a smaller version of Multics. I've never heard PR1MEOS referred to that way, but it makes a lot of sense. It was a lot easier to wrap one's brain around than the competition.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Wikipedia says that Multics had "about 80 installations". That's probably a big part of why Multics is given short shrift - it was successfully built, but (approximately) nobody cared. Wikipedia also notes that Unix ran on less expensive hardware than Multics. That mattered - there were many more systems that Unix could be put on.
- msla 3y ago
  > Wikipedia says that Multics had "about 80 installations". It was a mainframe operating system that only ran on high-end hardware. What do you expect? > Wikipedia also notes that Unix ran on less expensive hardware than Multics. Yes. It was also less capable. Both of those things were design goals of Unix and not of Multics.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    > It was a mainframe operating system that only ran on high-end hardware. What do you expect? I expect that by 1975, say, the number of high-end hardware installations was a lot more than 80. Multics, even when completed, didn't make much of a dent in the world. The ideas were influential, used in a number of later OSes, but Multics itself didn't go very far. > Yes. It was also less capable. Both of those things were design goals of Unix and not of Multics. Yes. Multics had the wrong design goals. Arguably, it hit them, but that didn't matter, because they were the wrong goals (though not obviously wrong at the time). That's why Multics is given short shrift - it successfully implemented what turned out in retrospect to be the wrong thing. Why were they the wrong goals? There were something like 600,000 PDP-11s sold. Sure, Unix didn't go on all of those, and Multics could have run on more than the 80 machines that it did. Still, that's an insanely large number of installations that they... not exactly ignored, because even the first PDP-11 hadn't shipped when the Multics project began, but at least a huge number of machines that they were unable to serve. And of course, as always happens in this business, the lower-end machines became more and more powerful. The result of that (plus easier portability) was that Unix ate the world, and Multics became a footnote.

by msla 3y ago

cafard 3y ago

Multics influenced a number of minicomputer OSes of the 1970s. I never used PRIMEOS, but have heard it described as a smaller version of Multics. I did use Data General's AOS/VS, and that had been influenced by Multics--so I suppose that its predecessor AOS also had been.

reaperducer 3y ago
I never used PRIMEOS, but have heard it described as a smaller version of Multics. I've never heard PR1MEOS referred to that way, but it makes a lot of sense. It was a lot easier to wrap one's brain around than the competition.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

Wikipedia says that Multics had "about 80 installations". That's probably a big part of why Multics is given short shrift - it was successfully built, but (approximately) nobody cared. Wikipedia also notes that Unix ran on less expensive hardware than Multics. That mattered - there were many more systems that Unix could be put on.

msla 3y ago
> Wikipedia says that Multics had "about 80 installations". It was a mainframe operating system that only ran on high-end hardware. What do you expect? > Wikipedia also notes that Unix ran on less expensive hardware than Multics. Yes. It was also less capable. Both of those things were design goals of Unix and not of Multics.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  > It was a mainframe operating system that only ran on high-end hardware. What do you expect? I expect that by 1975, say, the number of high-end hardware installations was a lot more than 80. Multics, even when completed, didn't make much of a dent in the world. The ideas were influential, used in a number of later OSes, but Multics itself didn't go very far. > Yes. It was also less capable. Both of those things were design goals of Unix and not of Multics. Yes. Multics had the wrong design goals. Arguably, it hit them, but that didn't matter, because they were the wrong goals (though not obviously wrong at the time). That's why Multics is given short shrift - it successfully implemented what turned out in retrospect to be the wrong thing. Why were they the wrong goals? There were something like 600,000 PDP-11s sold. Sure, Unix didn't go on all of those, and Multics could have run on more than the 80 machines that it did. Still, that's an insanely large number of installations that they... not exactly ignored, because even the first PDP-11 hadn't shipped when the Multics project began, but at least a huge number of machines that they were unable to serve. And of course, as always happens in this business, the lower-end machines became more and more powerful. The result of that (plus easier portability) was that Unix ate the world, and Multics became a footnote.