Multics in a sentence

After Honeywell stopped supporting Multics, users migrated to other systems, including Unix.

But the internal design philosophy was quite different, focusing on keeping the system small and simple, and so correcting some deficiencies of Multics because of its high resource demands on the limited computer hardware of the time.

Corbató and the other designers of the Multics operating system envisioned a computer facility operating “like a power company or water company”.

Despite this, early versions of Multics were broken into repeatedly. citation This led to further work that made the system much more secure and prefigured modern security engineering techniques.

Due to its many novel and valuable ideas, Multics had a significant impact in the computer field even though it was derided by some critics at the time.

Equally importantly, with the appropriate settings on the Multics security facilities, the code in the other segment could then gain access to data structures maintained in a different process.

However the machine was still in development in 1969, by which time the Multics project had finally produced an operating system usable by end-users.

Initially developed in a 6502 assembler running on the Multics time sharing system, citation citation citation VisiCalc was ported to numerous platforms, both 8-bit and some of the early 16-bit systems.

In Multics, a file (or a segment from a multi-segment file) is mapped into a segment in the address space, so files are always mapped at a segment boundary.

It concludes that Multics offered considerably stronger security than most systems commercially available in 2002.

It was written in PL/1 by Honeywell for the Multics operating system and first sold in June 1976.

Multics compilers generally optimised more for code density than CPU performance, for example using small sub-routines called operators for short standard code-sequences, making direct comparison of object code size with more modern systems less useful.

Multics development continued at MIT and General Electric.

Multics Maclisp had a far larger address space, but was expensive to use.

Multics required a number of additional features in the CPU to be truly effective, and John Couleur was joined by Edward Glaser at MIT to make the required modifications.

Multics used the term "wired".

Multics was conceived as a commercial product for GE, and became one for Honeywell, but not a very successful one.

Multics was the first major operating system to be designed as a secure system from the outset.

Stratus VOS is the most directly-related descendant of Multics still in active development and production usage today.

The first MIT GE-645 had 512 kilowords of memory (2 MiB), a truly enormous amount at the time, and the kernel only used a moderate portion of Multics main memory.