> I expect that by 1975, say, the number of high-end hardware installations was a lot more than 80. Yes, part of the problem was that, for all of its goals of

> I expect that by 1975, say, the number of high-end hardware installations was a lot more than 80. Yes, part of the problem was that, for all of its goals of portability, Multics only ever ran on two kinds of computer, and depended on their hardware features quite intimately. Compared to Unix, it was not effectively portable. > 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. [snip] > 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. Yes: The computing utility concept came to pass on a smaller scale than the Multics people anticipated, and so could get by with smaller, cheaper, and less reliable hardware and software, which eventually grew up to be more Multics-level in capacity and reliability without becoming as expensive. My point with my original post was to push back on the notion that Multics was a complete failure, that it stagnated and died after Bell Labs left the project. It didn't, it produced an OS that found a tiny commercial niche, and it executed on its vision to the extent the world as a whole allowed it to. The fact the world moved in a different direction doesn't take away from the technical accomplishment of the Multics development team.