FAQ Multics History
Tom Van Vleck
URL: //www.multicians.org/history.html
Please post updates to alt.os.multics or mail to <webm...@multicians.org>
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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 IBM 2301 drums
for swapping and provided remote access to up to 30 users via an IBM
7750 communications controller connected to dialup modems. Story: "The
IBM 7094 and CTSS".
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, ARPA 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.
Chapter 6 of Ronda Hauben's Netizens describes CTSS and the beginnings
of Project MAC at MIT.
A movie clip from 1964 of MIT Prof. Robert M. Fano, Director of Project
MAC, describing time-sharing and using CTSS on a Model 35 Teletype is
available on YouTube.
1.2.1 Precursors
Paging had already been demonstrated on the Atlas system in the early 60s
(with 16 pages), and the Burroughs B5000 incorporated segmentation.
(Ted Glaser had been part of the B5000 design team.) MIT Prof. Jack
Dennis of MIT contributed influential architectural ideas to the
beginning of Multics, especially the idea of combining paging and
segmentation.
1.3. Selection of vendor
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 General Electric Phoenix, 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.
The GE-645 was an enhanced version of the commercial GE-635, which in
turn was a descendant of the GE M236 machine that GE had supplied to
the US Air Force in the early 60s.
Kazumasa Mine At that time, ([Couleur John F. Couleur]} was responsible
for General Electric's 600 product lines. Couleur co-operated with
Edward L. Glaser of MIT on the design of the 645, adding paging,
segmentation, associative meories or translation lookaside buffers (US
Patent 3,412,382), and various functions MIT required, to the base GE-
635. Nowadays, almost all compters supporting virtual memory have a TLB
in their Memory Management Unit. Couleur's recollections are in "The
core of the Black Canyon Computer Corporation," IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing, Volume 17, Issue 4, Winter 1995.
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)
* John Weil, then Eugene White, then C. Walker Dix (GE).
The Triumvirate was in charge of actual management of the implementation.
Membership changed over the years. The initial composition was
* Fernando J. Corbato (MIT)
* Ed Vance (GE)
* Vic Vyssotsky (BTL).
The final composition was
* 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,
for example H. R. J. Grosch, in DATAMATION, November 1, 1971:
Inspect now the far end, the impossible end, of the feasibility spectrum.
Here we find that hecatomb called SAGE, and the other (all the other)
command and control projects. We find the great corporate MIS systems-
the automated board room, the self-optimizing model, the realistic
management game. And, pardon my chuckles, if we turn over a few flat
stones we may even find MULTICS.
Others argued with the idea of writing a system in a high level language
or with the use of virtual memory.
2. Initial construction
A GE-635 was delivered to Project MAC in August 1965 for use running the
645 simulator. The 645 was delivered to Project MAC in January 1967,
and Multics was self hosting, able to compile itself on, by the end of
1968.
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.
The MSPM contained functional requirements, high-level design, and
implementation plans for Multics. When we actually started building and
integrating the system, we discovered that some of the MSPM designs
were far too complex. Simpler, more efficient facilities were built
instead, sometimes as interim measures intended to evolve into the full
design eventually, and sometimes as recognition that the original plan
attempted too much. The MSPM was updated to reflect some of the early
redesigns, but quickly got behind. We did try to keep a particular
section up to date, the one that documented the system module
interfaces, i.e. the code that was actually in the system.
{See Development Documentation}
2.2. Compilers
PL/I was chosen as the programming language in 1964. {A detailed
discussion of the history and features of Multics PL/I is on a separate
page.} Bell Labs contracted with Digitek for a PL/I compiler, and fired
them after a year, and wrote EPL.
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.
[Ed Fredkin] Prof. Licklider, then the director of Project MAC, asked to
see me. He told me, confidentially, that ARPA wanted to stop funding
Multics. Licklider felt that there needed to be a graceful way for MIT
to come to the conclusion, on its own, that the Multics project should
be scrapped. I was sympathetic to Lick's position. He suggested to me
that I serve on a committee which would study the state of the Multics
project and which would obviously come to the conclusion that the best
course of action was to terminate the project. I agreed.
So the committee was formed and it met at MIT's Project MAC. We decided
to have the key Multics figures, Professors Corbato and Saltzer (and,
to my recollection, others) explain both the state of Multics and the
state of the implementation project. It seemed to me, from their
behavior, that it was obvious to them that the project was likely to be
terminated. As this process started there was no doubt in my mind that
the committee would come to the conclusion that Lick expected. As I
listened to the Multics story I was impressed by 2 things: the
fantastic accomplishments of the Multics team, and the miserably poor
telling of it. Corby, so much under the gun to get the next set of
things done, spoke mainly about the things they were urgently working
on that month (or that week)!
While I felt that the rest of the committee was leaning towards
recommending termination, I began to realize that killing off Multics
was a terrible idea. My reasoning was as follows: While the Multics
project might have been overly ambitious, it was the sole embodiment a
great number of very important ideas. The current efforts were taking
advantage of lessons learned; knowledge and experience available
nowhere else on the planet. If we killed off Multics, it was likely
that these ideas would become lost art and would be discredited along
with the whole Multics project; all to the possible detriment of many
future projects. I decided that the committee had to come to the
opposite conclusion to the one that Lick expected.
I was so certain that my new position was correct, that I planned and
contrived to do the following: figure out exactly how it could be
arranged so that the committee as a whole would decide in favor of
continuing Multics. Was I manipulative? I don't remember the details
but the answer is "Probably".
[THVV] (Who was on this committee besides Larry Roberts, Butler Lampson,
Ed Fredkin, and Dave Evans?) {See Multics -- the First Seven Years and
A Mangerial View of the Multics System Development}.
3. Use at MIT
See the MIT Site History.
3.1. Bell labs withdraws (4/1969)
"Over time, hope was replaced by frustration as the group effort
initially failed to produce an economically useful system. Bell Labs
withdrew from the effort in 1969 but a small band of users at Bell Labs
Computing Science Research Center in Murray Hill -- Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna -- continued to seek
the Holy Grail." -- Lucent web page
"... the problem was the increasing obviousness of the failure of Multics
to deliver promptly any sort of usable system, let alone the panacea
envisioned earlier." -- Dennis Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix
Time-sharing System"
(more?)
3.2. TOSS summer study (7/1969)
The Cambridge Project was an ARPA-funded political science computing
project. (Given the nature of the research, the funds probably came
from one of the security agencies, and were channeled through ARPA.)
They worked on stuff like survey analysis and simulation, led by MIT
Prof. 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 (see below).
(get info from Art Evans on Programming Linguistics, 6.231, first
academic course at MIT taught using Multics, summer of 1969)
3.3. MIT usage (10/69)
MIT's Multics was finally opened for paying customers in October 1969,
several years later than planned. Responsibility for running the GE-645
was transferred from Project MAC to MIT's Information Processing
Center. 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.
3.3.1 Cambridge Project
[John Klensin] 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.
3.3.2 System Development
The main usage of the new Multics system was system programming for
Multics itself. The development team was mostly comprised of MIT staff
members working at Project MAC, and GE staff members working at the
Cambridge Information Systems Laboratory (CISL). In addition to using
the system for online editing and compilation of system programs, the
MIT system would be reconfigured into two systems, one of which was
used for service, and the other for a "development run," in which a new
version of the supervisor was tested.
The GE-645 remained on the ninth floor of Technology Square's Alpha
building and provided service to the MIT campus via the MIT private
telephone exchange. The Project MAC members of the Multics development
team were mostly on the fifth floor of the Tech Square Alpha building.
CISL programmers were located on the seventh floor of the building, and
later moved to the new Beta building across the courtyard. Some GE
personnel in Phoenix, where the hardware was built, accessed the system
via GE's private phone network.
CISL's language team under Axel Kvilekval and Bob Freiburghouse produced
the version 1 PL/I compiler and the system was recompiled and in many
cases rewritten to take advantage of the much better code produced by
the new compiler.
3.3.3 Other MIT Usage
Project MAC had quite a few other users of the early Multics. Many of
these users used Multics for document creation and formatting and
electronic mail as much as they did programming. One group at Project
MAC was working on what became the ARPANet, and they designed the
hardware and software that connected Multics to the ARPANet as host 0
on IMP #6 in September 1971. Other Project MAC groups that used Multics
included a group doing early research in relational databases.
Other MIT research projects switched over from the overloaded CTSS to
Multics, hoping to take advantage of the new machine's advanced
features. Other computer science research projects outside MIT also
secured accounts at the MIT Information Processing Center and did some
usage of Multics.
4. Use at RADC (8/1970)
The second Multics 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.
See the RADC site history.
[RFC 208] RADC was added to the ARPANet as host 18 as of 10/5/71.
5. Honeywell (1970)
GE sold its computer business to Honeywell in 1970. This is referred to
as the "merger." (See Jean Bellec's story of Shangri-La.)
6. Commercial announcement (1/1973)
There were several commercial announcements of Multics. 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, 2/1976)
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 released the first commercial relational database, the Multics
Relational Data Store, implemented by Jim Weeldreyer and Oris Friesen
of Honeywell Phoenix and released in June 1976. MRDS included a report
writer called MRPG written by Jim Falksen. (See Paul McJones's page on
MRDS on his System R website.)
7.3. Multics installations
7.3.1. Air Force Data Services Center
See the AFDSC site history.
7.3.2. General Motors
See the GM site history.
7.3.3. Ford
See the Ford site history.
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
{Story: The Louisiana State Trooper Story}
See the USL site history.
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 (1978)
This report by consulting firm Palyn Associates was commissioned by HIS
corporate in 1978 to decide long range plan for LISD. UCLA Prof. Jerry
Popek & George Rossman were principal authors. Forest Baskett, Mike
Stonebraker, and John Hennessey also contributed. The report
recommended capping CP-6, GCOS-3, and GCOS-4 and concentrating on
Multics. LISD whitewashed and committeed the project to death and did
nothing. {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 (1985)
Multics received the B2 Orange Book rating from the NCSC in August 1985,
the culmination of a long effort.
8.3 Multics cancellation (1985)
Multics development was canceled by Honeywell in July 1985. (This was
Honeywell's sixth attempt to cancel the system. The decision was made
in November 1984 by Gene Manno, and announced the following July.) In
1985, Multics was the only profitable product in the Office Marketing
Systems Division. {Story: Honeywell Management}
CISL was closed in June 1986.
Black armband from HLSUA 10/85 [Garry Kaiser]
8.4 HLSUA Task Force
A HLSUA Task Force was formed in April 1986 to look at migration from
Multics to the DPS 6 Plus, following a presentation by Gene Manno at
HLSUA. Members were Vince Scarafino (Ford), James Stephens (GM), Bob
Kansa (EDS), Paul Amaranth (Oakland University), Norm Powroz (Canadian
DND), and Norm Barnecut (University of Calgary). By 1987, Honeywell had
backed away from supporting key elements of Multics function on the DPS
6 Plus.
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 (1985)
[WOS] 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.
[THVV] 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.
Tom Rykken led the Flower project in Minneapolis. He provided us with his
recollections of the Flower project.
9.2. Multics Company Merlin (1985)
[WOS] 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.
9.3. The Michael Tague project (1987)
[WOS, JWG] 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.
9.4. Opus (1986)
[WOS, John Ata] 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 code-named "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, later known as Wang Federal and DigitalNet, and now
known as BAE Systems) 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.
[John Ata] The XTS-300 (STOP 4.1) has also been awarded a B3 rating after
the successful 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.
9.5. Multics on Cyber 180 study (1985)
[WOS] 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.
9.6. Multics on Sequent (or other Intel 386/486) (1985-1987)
[WOS] 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.
9.7. Multics on DPS90
[WOS] 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.
[Vince Scarafino] 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).
[Charles Bouchier] During the period that NEC was building the DPS90/9000
series I was Director of Scientific/Engineering Marketing for Major
Accounts out of Phoenix and we also wanted to port Multics to the
DPS90s for continued revenues with some of the larger companies that
were clambering for more power with the Multics OS. The bottom line was
that NEC wanted $1,000,000 to do the board and firmware reworks and HIS
-> HB was not willing to pony up...which became an obvious mistake as
from that point on there was nowhere else to go with Multics in a
competitive market.
9.8. Honeywell and Bull (1986)
Honeywell decided that it was more comfortable making thermostats and
cluster bombs, and sold its computer division to its French partner
Bull in 1986. 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 (4/1988)
In 1988, Bull 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 had its
own Multics system, and at one time said it "intends to be the last
Multics machine running."
[David Schroth] Perigon Solutions was acquired by CGI Group Inc.
subsidiary CGI Information Systems and Management Consultants Inc. in
September 1998. CGI continued to operate a dual 8/70M in Calgary.
Formal support was no longer offered to the Multics community. CGI shut
down its Multics on July 7, 2000.
9.10. DOCKMASTER Shutdown (03/1998)
The US National Security Agency's DOCKMASTER machine was shut down in
March, 1998, after repeated extensions. The hardware from this site,
except for the hard drives, was given to the National Cryptologic
Museum, which in turn loaned it permanently to the Computer Museum
History Center in Mountain View, California.
9.11. The Last Site (10/2000)
[Jim Corey] The last Multics system running, the Canadian Department of
National Defence Multics site in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, shut
down October 30, 2000 at 17:08Z. This system was modified to be Y2K
compliant and was the main production system until Sept/00.
9.12. Release of Source (11/2007)
Bull HN has made the entire source available "for any purpose and
without fee" at MIT as of November 2007. new