Multics
 
The Multics Operating System, developed at MIT beginning in the late 1960s, pioneered many advanced OS concepts. It was one of the first operating systems to be written in a high-level language, PL/I. The developers of unix  adapted many Multics features, stripping out the security and reliability of Multics to shoehorn unix onto the limited minicomputers of the time.

For detailed information on Multics, see www.multicians.org.

Here are some Multics-related links.

Unless otherwise noted, all programs are written in VisualAge PL/I 1.1 for OS/2 Warp. They should be relatively easily ported to other operating systems and PL/I compilers. They require the PL/I 1.1 DLLs from Hobbes if you don't already have them.
  • Proposal for a standard method of storing the contents of Multics Standard Tapes in files. Comments welcome.
     
  • The Multics archive (ac) command was perhaps the "mother of all" file packaging commands such as tar  and zip . I have written a "work-alike" of archive to provide access to such Multics archives as may exist.
    The complete distribution of archive, including sources and binaries, is available from Hobbes.
    A zipped tar file of source and documentation only, for those unlucky enough not to be running OS/2, is also available.
     
  • RESTORE is a zipfile containing programs and commands for restoring data from Multics backup tapes. This is in no way a production-quality package, but some might find it useful. This package includes the following:
    • RESTORE - restore program
    • MST - package to read simulated Multics Standard Tapes, with checksum verification, error block handling, and sequence checking.
    • DUMPSIMH - program to dump blocks of SIMH tape files (see below).
    • BLKCOMP - block-by-block compare of two SIMH tape files.
    • SIMH - package to read and write SIMH tape files
    A complete zip file for restore is available here (143k).
     
  • DUMPSIMH is a program which will dump selected blocks from "SIMH"-format simulated tapes where the data is composed of 36-bit words, four 9-bit ASCII characters per word.
    A zip file of source and documentation for dumpsimh is available here (14k).
     
  • An HTMLized copy of a 1969 Datamation  article by Fernando J. Corbató, the father of Multics, titled "PL/I as a Tool for System Programming".
     
  • Al Kossow has scanned several Multics manuals for his "BitSavers.org" site.
     
  • Just for fun, the Multics logo  Multics logo formatted as an OS/2 boot logo.
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