Multics

[admfubar]

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/07/09/0414245/48-year-old-multics-operating-system-resurrected?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

I wonder if the audio upgrade is twin victrolas!

[Steve Alexander]

On 07/09/2017 10:53 PM, admfubar wrote:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/07/09/0414245/48-year-old-multics-operating-system-resurrected?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

I wonder if the audio upgrade is twin victrolas!

--

You might want to reconsider that level of snark.  Multics was an extremely advanced OS, and not only was the 'UNIX' name a reference to a limited-feature Multics, but as time passed most of the major OS features of Multics were slowly added to Linux.  The 1964-1967 Multics development included a plethora of features; many related to the virtual paging, security and access control.  Linux/Unix didn't have any virtual memory support till the ~1979 BSD 'VMUNIX', no shared libraries & objects like Multics, till the early 1990s IIRC, and the mmap() syscall [a fundamental feature of Multics] wasn't compatible in Linux till 2.6.27 in 2008.  Many other features added along the way, and a few still need to be added (like online kernel updates).

A retrospective examination of Multics is stunning - something like discovering that the ancient Greeks made smart-phones - way ahead of it's time. [Unsurprisingly the hardware of the era wasn't very good at supporting Multics].