X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Multics


Memory segmentation

The GE-645 computer, a modification of the GE-635 with segmentation and paging support added, was designed in 1964 to support Multics.

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

One of the early focuses of Project MAC would be the development of a successor to CTSS, Multics, which was to be the first high availability computer system, developed as a part of an industry consortium including General Electric and Bell Laboratories.

Roff

It was a Unix version of the runoff text-formatting program from Multics, which was a descendant of RUNOFF for CTSS (the first computerized text-formatting application).

Thompson shell

The name "shell" for a command line interpreter and the concept of making the shell a user program outside of the operating system kernel were introduced in Unix's precursor Multics.


Similar

Multics | MULTICS |

Bulls and cows

A computer program moo, written in 1970 by J. M. Grochow at MIT in the PL/I computer language for the Multics operating system, was amongst the first Bulls and Cows computer implementations, inspired by a similar program written by Frank King in 1968 and running on the Cambridge University mainframe.

Command-line interface

Around 1964 Louis Pouzin introduced the concept and the name shell in Multics, building on earlier, simpler facilities in the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).

Jack Dennis

Multics was not fully successful as a commercial project, but it was important because it influenced the design of many other computer operating systems, including inspiration for Ken Thompson to design Unix.

Keydata Corporation

Keydata was located in Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where project MAC, the seminal venture sponsored by MIT which saw the developmemt of MULTICS one of the earliest time sharing software systems.

Multics Emacs

Multics Emacs was an implementation of the Emacs text editor written in Maclisp by Bernard Greenberg at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab.

Stratus Technologies

That line runs the VOS operating system, which originally had many features inspired by or derived from Multics.


see also