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Summary: History of the Multics operating system.

archive-name: multics/history
URL: //www.multicians.org/history.html

Please post updates to alt.os.multics or mail to <thvv@best.com>
=================================================================


1. Beginnings



1.1. CTSS

The Compatible Timesharing System (CTSS) was one of the first timesharing
  systems. It was developed at the MIT Computation Center by a team led
  by Fernando J. Corbato. CTSS was first demonstrated in 1961 on the IBM
  709, swapping to tape. In its mature form, CTSS ran on a modified IBM
  7094 with a second 32K-word bank of memory, using two 2301 drums for
  swapping and provided remote access to up to 30 users via an IBM 7750
  communications controller connected to dialup modems.

1.2. MIT Project MAC

Project MAC was suggested in November 1962 by J. C. R. Licklider; its
  founding director was MIT Prof. Robert M. Fano. MAC stood for Multiple
  Access Computers on the 5th floor of 545 Tech Square and Man and
  Computer on the 9th floor; the major efforts were Corbato's Multics
  development and Marvin Minsky's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In
  1963 Project MAC hosted a summer study, which brought many well-known
  computer scientists to Cambridge to use CTSS and to discuss the future
  of computing.

Funding for Project MAC was provided by the Information Processing
  Techniques Office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of
  the US Department of Defense. According to the National Academy of
  Sciences report Academic Careers For Experimental Computer Scientists
  And Engineers, APRA contributed $2 million per year to project MAC for
  eight years for Multics development (not sure if this includes other
  activities such as the AI Lab). During this time period, Bell Labs and
  GE/Honeywell contributed comparable resources.

1.3. Selection of vendor

Prof. Jack Dennis of MIT contributed some influential architectural ideas
  to the beginning of Multics, especially the idea of segmentation. The
  Multics specifications were developed and sent out to bid in 1963. When
  it came time to select a vendor for the computer that would support the
  new OS, the folklore is that IBM pitched the machine that would become
  the 360/65. They were not interested in the MAC team's ideas on paging
  and segmentation. Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum, then a lecturer at MIT,
  introduced the MAC team to former colleagues of his from GE
  Schenectady, who were receptive and enthusiastic, and proposed what
  became the GE-645. DEC also responded to the bid. The GE proposal was
  chosen and the contract signed in August 1964.

1.4. MIT, Bell Labs, GE

Bell Labs decided to buy a GE-645 in early 1965 and joined the software
  development effort, and GE also agreed to contribute. The three
  organizations worked out a structure for cooperation. The Trinity made
  major policy decisions. There was one person from each organization:
  Robert M. Fano (MIT), Edward E. David (BTL), C. Walker Dix (GE). The
  Triumvirate was in charge of actual management of the implementation:
  Fernando J. Corbato (MIT), A. L. Dean (GE), Peter G. Neumann (BTL).
  Jerome H. Saltzer and Edward L. Glaser were consultants to the
  triumvirate.

1.5. Papers at 1965 FJCC

Six papers describing Multics were presented at a special session at the
  1965 Fall Joint Computer Conference. At the time, some people thought
  the system's goals were too ambitious, and that it couldn't be built.
  Other argued with the idea of writing a system in a high level language
  or with the use of virtual memory. (more, ask PGN?)

2. Initial construction



2.1. The MSPM

While waiting for the PL/I compiler to become available, the team wrote
  the Multics System Programmer's Manual (MSPM). It was about 3000 pages;
  every section went through serious review and many sections were
  rewritten or deeply revised several times. {See Development
  Documentation}

2.2. Compilers

PL/I was chosen as the programming language in 1964. Other possibilities
  were a port of MAD or a port of AED-0. (How was PL/I chosen??) We got
  permission from IBM to reprint their language manual. The full PL/I
  language was harder to implement than expected. A contract was awarded
  to Digitek to produce a PL/I compiler; Bell Labs administered the
  contract. The contractor assigned two people and had not produced a
  compiler after a year. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy created a backup
  plan for a PL/I compiler, using McClure's TMG language on the 7094.
  This language was called EPL (Early PL/I); the compiler produced output
  in EPLBSA (EPL Bootstrap Assembler). Compilation was very slow and
  language features were limited.

2.3. Management

In 1968-69 the system was late and under significant financial pressure
  and threat of cancellation. Maybe this helped esprit de corps (as
  opposed to surface morale). A review by a select ARPA committee in 1968
  was one time we came close to cancellation; they recommended that we
  continue. (Who was on this besides Butler Lampson?) {See Multics -- the
  First Seven Years and A Mangerial View of the Multics System
  Development}.

3. Use at MIT



3.1. Bell labs withdraws (4/69)

(more?)

3.2. TOSS summer study (7/69)

The Cambridge Project was an ARPA-funded political science computing
  project. They worked on stuff like survey analysis and simulation, led
  by Ithiel de Sola Pool, J. C. R. Licklider and Douwe B. Yntema. Yntema
  had done a system on the MIT Lincoln Labs TX-2 called the Lincoln
  Reckoner, and in the summer of 1969 led a Cambridge Project team in the
  construction of an experiment called TOSS (terminal oriented social
  science? anyway it was intentionally a throwaway system). TOSS was sort
  of like Logo, with matrix operators. Its big feature was multiple
  levels of undo, back to the level of the login session. This feature
  was cheap on the Lincoln Reckoner, but absurdly expensive on Multics.
  This project provided some much-needed revenue to keep the 645 going
  until it could go public, and was a precursor to the Consistent System.

(get info from Art Evans on Programming Linguistics, 6.231)

3.3. MIT usage (10/69)

The system was finally opened for paying customers in October 1969,
  several years late. Pioneer users of the system put up with a lot:
  crashes, poor response, constant change, arrogance from developers, and
  inexplicably missing features. The Multics developers and the MIT
  Information Processing Center management worked furiously to fix
  problems and make good on overdue promises, and to stave off
  abandonment of the system by ARPA, GE, or large MIT users.

The Cambridge Project was a major user and revenue source. It built an
  application called the Consistent System, the largest application ever
  built on Multics and the most comprehensive data analysis modeling and
  analysis system ever built. Consistent System developers and users
  pressed for better function, reliability, and performance and
  contributed important code and ideas to Multics. Applications built on
  the CS or its components became a major portion of the workload at
  several customer sites and contributed to the length of time a few of
  those systems stayed in operation. AFDSC comes particularly to mind
  here, although the Human Resources databases at EDS and some of the
  applications at Credit Lyonnais are probably also candidates. (info
  from John Klensin)

4. Use at RADC (8/70)

The second site was at Rome Air Development Center, Griffiss AFB, Rome,
  New York. Some research done at this site was classified intelligence
  studies. RADC also studied software engineering and software tools.
  They attached an associative processor, a Goodyear Staran, 1000 1-bit
  processors, to their Multics and did pattern recognition work. The
  Staran daemon was assigned a load of 1.5.

5. Honeywell (1970)

GE sold its computer business to Honeywell in 1970. This is referred to
  as the "merger." (more?)

6. Commercial announcement (1/73)

There were several commercial announcements. The Honeywell 6180 was
  announced in January 1973 at the Boston Museum of Science. 6180
  processors were about 1 MIPS each. A two-CPU system with 768KB of
  memory, 8MB of bulk store, 1.6GB of disk, 8 tape drives, and two
  DN355s, like MIT's system, had a purchase price of about $7 million.

7. The 70s



7.1. New Storage System (28.0, 2/76)

A major project during the 1970s was the implementation of the New
  Storage System (NSS). The initial Multics file system design had
  evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. When multiple disk units
  were used they were just assigned increasing ranges of disk addresses,
  so a segment could have pages scattered over all disks on the system.
  This provided good I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive.
  NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system, introducing the
  concepts of logical and physical volumes and a mapping from a Multics
  directory branch to a VTOC entry for each file. The new system had much
  better recovery performance in exchange for a small space and
  performance cost. {Story: The New Storage System}

7.2. MRDS

Multics had the first commercial relational database, the Multics
  Relational Data Store, implemented by Jim Weeldreyer and Oris Friesen
  of Honeywell Phoenix in about 1977. MRDS included a report writer
  called MRPG written by Jim Falksen. (more, ask Weeldreyer or Friesen)

7.3. Multics installations



7.3.1. Air Force Data Services Center

(more?)

7.3.2. General Motors

(more, ORAS)

7.3.3. Ford

This is far from a comprehensive history of the Ford site, but I thought
  I'd mention that Ford had Multics twice. In 1973-1975 Multics arrived
  on a trial basis that included a certain amount of joint OS
  development. The Ford systems group had a fair knowledge of operating
  systems, having originally supported the Ford Philco 212 OS, and
  welcomed the chance to contribute to this interesting new system called
  Multics. To this day the following software products are licensed from
  Bull at no charge to Ford because of the joint development effort on
  MR3:
* AGS6802 ISTAT
* SGC6800 Multics Comm System
* SGC6803 Bisync support, MCS
* SGC6804 G115 support, MCS
* SGE6800 Multics Software Extensions
* SGE6802 RJE facility
* SGL6801 Fortran-77
* SGL6802 Basic
* SGS6800 Multics Exec
* SGS6801 GCOS TSS Environment

Alas, Multics fell victim to economic and experimental woes. Because it
  was an experimental/evaluation system users were reluctant to write
  applications for it. Because there were no applications for it, when
  the economy dipped and money got tight there was no justification for
  keeping it.

It came back in sunnier economic times several years later. In 1978
  applications were written on System-M, then moved to Ford's own Multics
  system when it arrived later that year. By this time MR6.5 was
  available and Multics was a more robust product. The next year Multics
  was moved by upgrading from Level68 to 8/70Ms into its new home in the
  Engineering Computer Center. It grew into three systems, with capacity
  and usage peaking around 1989. The last major upgrade was to convert
  from 501 to 3381 model disks, convert IOMs to IMUs, and upgrade to
  MR12.1 in 1988.

Most of the Multics applications were migrated to Sequent systems, and in
  1995 only one Multics system (two applications) remained. [Bruce
  Sanderson, Ford Motor Co]

7.3.4. Industrial Nucleonics

Industrial Nucleonics bought a single-processor Multics and a hundred
  Level 6 minicomputers in the late 70s. They used the Level 6 machines
  as industrial process controllers, using nuclear sensors to measure
  process variables such as the thickness of paper produced by a paper
  mill. The Multics machine was the software factory.

The company was later renamed AccuRay, after its measurement technology
  product, and later still was bought by Asea Brown Boveri. ABB shut down
  its Multics in 1991 and bought Multics time from ACTC for a while.

7.3.5. University of SW Louisiana

(more)

7.3.6. French university system

(more?)

7.4. Project Guardian

Project Guardian grew out of the ARPA support for Multics and the sale of
  Multics systems to the US Air Force. USAF wanted a system that could be
  used to handle more than one security classification of data at a time.
  They contracted with Honeywell and MITRE to figure out how to do this.
  Project Guardian led to the creation of the Access Isolation Mechanism,
  the forerunner of the B2 labeling and star property support in Multics.
  The DoD Orange Book was influenced by the experience in building secure
  systems gained in Project Guardian.

7.5. ARPA network software

(more?)

7.6. The Palyn Report

Report commissioned by HIS corporate in 1978 to decide long range plan
  for LISD. Prof. Jerry Popek & George Rossman were principal authors.
  Forrest Baskett, Mike Stonebraker, and John Hennessey also contributed.
  Report recommended capping CP-6, GCOS-3, and GCOS-4 and concentrating
  on Multics. LISD whitewashed & committeed the thing to death. {Story:
  The Palyn Report}

8. The 80s



8.1. Sites

The 1980s saw a very large number of Multics sales in France and Europe.

8.2 B2 Rating

Multics received the B2 rating from the NCSC in August 1985, the
  culmination of a long effort.

8.3 Multics cancellation

Multics development was canceled by Honeywell in July 1985. CISL was
  closed in June 1986.

9. Termination and Rescue Attempts

In the mid-80s, Multics customers tried to pressure Honeywell to produce
  a faster Multics machine. The 8/70M was a generation behind
  competitors' hardware and Honeywell had no announced plans to produce
  new Multics processors. Many of the existing customers defected when
  the found that the operating system was not supported by the company.

9.1. Honeywell Flower (85)

Flower was never produced, but was intended to be a 3-4x faster machine
  implemented in gate arrays as a "test case" for Honeywell Corporate's
  Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) program (which was being
  done under contract to the DoD). The design got quite far along, and
  parts of it were even running in simulation, when the project was all
  canned in March 1985. It was to include significant architectural
  enhancements, most notably 8 more pointer registers and two new
  indirect types: self-relative and base-of-self-relative, as well as a
  bunch of minor ones.

Unlike the ADP, Flower wasn't based on a GCOS processor, it didn't have
  the other components to inherit from GCOS, and a significant amount of
  work would have been required to interface it to memory and I/O
  systems. There was a GCOS system planned (I do not believe it ever
  escaped the factory, either) which was where they were looking for the
  other components, but that whole area never really had a good answer
  before the end of the effort. It would have worked with the DPS8-M
  hardware, but not at its full speed advantage. (Olin Sibert)

In 1984, Flower was intended to be a 3 MIP processor, almost 5 times the
  power of the Honeywell Level 68. Using HT5000 bi-polar gate arrays, it
  would have fit on three 15"x15" boards. GCOS-only instructions,
  indirection modes (e.g., tally modifiers), processor modes, and data
  types (e.g. 6-bit BCD and 4-bit decimal) were omitted from the design.
  (TVV)

9.2. Multics Company Merlin

After Multics was canceled by Honeywell in July 1985, Olin Sibert
  attempted to form the "Multics Company" and purchase the technology
  from Honeywell. This was based around resurrecting the Flower design
  (afterward called Merlin) and building new Multics-specific I/O
  hardware (called Excalibur). This effort lasted around 6 months, then
  petered out when Honeywell realized that, while it might be good for
  customers, it could never be good for Honeywell.

The Merlin processor was simply the Flower recast in slower but more
  commercial technology, with assorted minor adjustments. I do not
  believe any parts were ever simulated, but there was a fair amount of
  design done, all by the engineers who'd had nothing to do since
  Flower's demise. (Olin Sibert)

9.3. The Michael Tague project

Another former Multician, Michael Tague (who managed the Opus software
  development), tried to resurrect Multics yet again in 1987, with the
  same engineers but with yet newer commercial technology (probably on a
  386 base). There was some discussion with Sequent about this project.
  The business plan emphasized the security of Multics on commodity
  hardware, assuming that there was a growing security market. Tague had
  much more enthusiastic support from the (changed) Honeywell management,
  but ultimately they screwed him, too, and nothing ever came of it. The
  technical work done included figuring out how to support UNIX binaries.
  Honeywell-Bull management wouldn't support it because they preferred to
  control the Multics source code and decided to contract maintenance and
  support to ACTC as a "safer" proposition. I do not know how far the
  project got in terms of hardware design. (Olin Sibert, John Gintell)

9.4. Opus (86)

As a sop to customers after canning Multics in 1985, Honeywell promised
  to provide everything Multics had, plus more, plus total compatibility
  with the Level 6/DPS6 operating system, through a system codenamed
  "Opus," officially named VS3 (short for HVS R3 or Honeywell Virtual
  System Release Three, to spell it all out). It was to run on the DPS6-
  plus hardware known internally as the MRX and HRX, and be all things to
  all people. The hardware was a dud (though it did run the native DPS6
  software just fine), and the goal was, shall we say, ambitious. The
  effort was canceled by Bull in 1987, in favor of another project going
  on in France.

An interesting postscript to this story, though, is that HFSI (formerly
  Honeywell Federal Systems, Inc., later a quasi independent corporate
  subsidiary of Bull, and now known as Wang Federal) built a highly
  secure system on the same DPS6-plus hardware. This is sort of a "second
  generation SCOMP" (which itself was the first system ever evaluated at
  A1), and it's called the XTS200.

XTS200 received (May 1992?) a B3 rating from NCSC. The evaluated system
  runs only on that big, expensive, slow DPS6plus hardware, though they
  have already ported it to 80486 machines in the lab, yielding about 7-
  10x the performance at one-twentieth the hardware cost. It has a
  largely satisfactory emulation of System V (release 3) UNIX as its
  interface, and near as I can tell will be the very first reasonable
  high-security system (in terms of compatibility, performance, and cost)
  ever delivered--once it's fully on the 486, that is. (Olin Sibert, John
  Ata)

The XTS-300 (STOP 4.1) has also been awarded a B3 rating after the
  sucessful completion of its RAMP cycle on May 30 of this year. As far
  as I'm aware, it was the first time that a product on one hardware
  platform was RAMPED from a similar product on another hardware
  platform. (John Ata)

9.5. Multics on Cyber 180 study (85)

There was a brief exploration (by the Multics Development Center) in
  early 1985 of porting Multics to the relatively new CDC mainframe
  hardware. It didn't get beyond the study stage. (Olin Sibert)

9.6. Multics on Sequent (or other Intel 386/486) (85-87)

Both as part of my "Multics Company" and Tague's project, there was some
  work devoted to porting Multics to the Intel architecture, specifically
  to the big Sequent multiprocessors. Again, nothing much came of it;
  this was late 1985 and early 1987. (Olin Sibert)

9.7. Multics on DPS90

Honeywell Bull (or whatever it was called by then) explored the
  possibility of running Multics in emulation on the DPS90 mainframe.
  This was, I think, a vain attempt to sell some large customer a DPS90
  or two--it actually would have worked fairly well, since the
  instruction sets are so similar, but it was too big a project for the
  sales organization to pull off. (Olin Sibert)

There was a considerable amount of preliminary work done on this. It was
  a sound proposal and would have provided a reasonable environment for
  porting Multics applications. The proposed approach would have only
  recreated the ring 4 Multics environment, though. Bull wanted its
  customers to pay, up front, for the project. None of the customers
  wanted to spend the money for what looked like a stay of execution (no
  pun intended). (Vince Scarafino)

9.8. Honeywell and Bull

Honeywell decided that it was more comfortable making thermostats and
  sold its computer division to its French partner Bull. The French
  government was a major investor in Bull. See the history of Bull
  website for much more on this subject.

9.9. Maintenance to Calgary (4/88)

In 1988, Honeywell transferred maintenance of Multics to the University
  of Calgary, which set up a separate corporation called ACTC
  Technologies Inc. to do this. (ACTC was renamed Perigon Systems Inc.)
  ACTC has its own Multics system, and at one time said it "intends to be
  the last Multics machine running."

Perigon Solutions was acquired by CGI Group Inc. subsidiary CGI
  Information Systems and Management Consultants Inc. in September 1998.
  CGI continues to operate a dual 8/70M in Calgary. Formal support is no
  longer offered to the Multics community. [info from David Schroth]