Multics PL/I

multicians.org

18 points·rbanffy··7 comments

Bit of trivia: The Bob Morris mentioned in this and many other Multics-related articles was the father of one of the people who made the implementation of the Lisp dialect this website runs on (and, of course, one of the founders of YC).

He later went on to do more UNIX-y things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer)

Multics was an elegant system and design kneecapped by a few ill-advised decisions and poor choice in contractors. It's worth exploring, if only for a little while.

Apollo Aegis, coded in what Apollo called Apollo Pascal, was inspired by Multics. In sophistication, it was way ahead of Unix in the 1980s, e.g. demand-paging across the local network. In some ways Unix has still not caught up.

For example, it could expand environment variables in symbolic link text.

I worked on DG minis running AOS/VS, which was also inspired by Multics, as I understand Prime's PrimeOS was.

I’d love to see one in action. Is there a reasonable emulator?

Me too. The problem is that it ran on 68020 and 68030 processors with token ring and distributed filesystem. I would love to see an emulated system. Also the clock bug does not help.

The network can be emulated across multiple processes (even 127.0.0.n has some space for multiple emulators). Is the hardware well specified enough? Are there working disk images?

[1] http://mess.redump.net/howto/apollo

[2] https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Driver:Apollo

Besides those two

[3] https://www.zepa.net/apollo/ and links and FAQs from there (some bitrotten) should suffice

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