Why not Multics? (was Re: BSD tty security, part 3: How to Fix It)

[Rick Smith]

dhesi%cirrusl at oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) writes:

>So why are we all using UNIX and its derivatives?  Why isn't Multics a
>commercial success even though it seems to have a unique place in
>history?

Because Honeywell owned it and their marketing types didn't understand
it, and it competed against the big, dumb IBM 7094 clones that Honeywell
was selling in competition against IBM 360/370/30xx, etc boxes. Perhaps
the marketing geeks figured that since IBM didn't design MULTICS, it
mustn't be a real system. People held strange beliefs back then.

>More specifically, where can we buy Multics to run on our favorite
>hardware?  Why can't we buy it?

It ran on custom hardware. Some people say, "In Unix, everything is
a file." In MULTICS, everything was a segment. It took special memory
management hardware to make segment handling run efficiently.

But a crucial thing to remember is that MULTICS was designed to meet
several requirements that Unix failed to seriously address until
quite recently. Security especially. And it's hard to retain "classic
Unix" when you are trying to incorporate a new requirement with such
vast ramifications.

Rick.
smith at sctc.com    Arden Hills, Minnesota