Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog
This is the personal web site and blog of Jos Kirps. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of EducDesign, the Joopita Project or any other company or project I'm related to.
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November 10, 2007This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists and the Open Source community: the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened.Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a "simplified" successor to MULTICS (the name "Unix" is itself a hack on "Multics"). The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000.From now on, MULTICS can be downloaded from the following page (it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in 2000, including the PL/1 compiler):http:// web.mit.edu/multics-history Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC, as MULTICS requires dedicated hardware, and there's no operational computer system today that could run this OS. Nevertheless the software should be considered to be an outstanding source for computer research and scientists. It is not yet know if it will be possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS.Special thanks to Tom Van Vleck for his continuous work on www.multicians.org , to the Group BULL including BULL HN Information Systems Inc. for opening the sources and making all this possible, to the folks at MIT for releasing it and to all of those who helped to convince BULL to open this great piece of computer history.©1996-2007 Jos Kirps | All rights reserved | Site Map
43 lata od powstania projektu, ujawniony został kod źródłowy systemu MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), uważanego za “ojca Uniksa” i innych nowoczesnych systemów operacyjnych.

MULTICS, stworzony na uczelni MIT, to jeden z najbardziej innowacyjnych i współczesnych systemów operacyjnych. Wprowadził do świata komputerów wiele nowych koncepcji, jak hierarchiczny system plików czy dynamiczne linkowanie.

UNIX był uznawany za “uproszczoną wersję MULTICSa”. Ostatnia działająca instancja MULTICSa - została odpięta od prądu 31 października 2000 roku. Mimo, że nie ma działających komputerów, na których można byłoby go uruchomić, można go pobrać ze stron MIT. Nie ma na razie żadnych informacji o tym, czy możliwe byłoby stworzenie odpowiednich emulatorów.