Subject: FAQ Multics History
Date: 1 Jan 1996 10:02:29 -0800
Summary: History of the Multics operating system.

archive-name: multics/history

10/03/94 THVV More info on the Tague project from John Gintell
05/02/95 THVV Minor corrections
07/17/95 THVV Nice chapter on Ford from Bruce Sanderson
11/03/95 THVV Info on XTS-300 from John Ata

Please post updates to alt.os.multics or mail to <thvv@best.com>
=================================================================
1.      Beginnings
1.1.      CTSS
1.2.      MIT Project MAC
1.3.      Selection of vendor
1.4.      MIT, Bell Labs, GE
1.5.      Papers at 1965 FJCC

2.      Initial construction
2.1.      The MSPM
2.2.      Compilers
2.3.      Management

3.      Use at MIT
3.1.      Bell labs withdraws (4/69)
3.2.      TOSS summer study (7/69)
3.3.      MIT usage (10/69)

4.      Use at RADC (8/70)

5.      Honeywell (1970)

6.      Commercial announcement (1/73)

7.      The 70s
7.1.      New Storage System (28.0, 2/76)
7.2.      MRDS
7.3.      Multics installations
7.3.1.      Air Force Data Services Center
7.3.2.      General Motors
7.3.3.      Ford
7.3.4.      Industrial Nucleonics
7.3.5.      University of SW Louisiana
7.3.6.      French university system
7.3.7.      <<more>>
7.4.      Project Guardian
7.5.      ARPA network software
7.6.      The Palyn Report

8.      The 80s
8.1.      Sites

9.      Termination
9.2.      Multics Company Merlin
9.3.      The Michael Tague project
9.4.      Opus (86)
9.5.      Multics on Cyber 180 (85)
9.6.      Multics on Sequent (or other Intel 386/486) (85-87)
9.7.      Multics on DPS90
9.8.      Honeywell and Bull
9.9.      Maintenance to Calgary (4/88)
=================================================================

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 ran on a modified IBM 7094 
with a second 32K-word bank of memory, using two 2301 drums for 
swapping. Remote access was provided to up to 30 users via an IBM 7750 
communications controller connected to dialup modems. 

1.2.      MIT Project MAC
Project MAC was suggested 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 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.

1.3.      Selection of vendor
Prof. Jack Dennis of MIT contributed some influential architectural 
ideas to the beginning of Multics. 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. 
Joseph Weizenbaum, then a lecturer at MIT, introduced the MAC team to 
former colleagues of his from GE Schenectady, 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. 

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: R M Fano (MIT), E E David (BTL), C W Dix (GE). The 
Triumvirate was in charge of actual management of the implementation: 
F J Corbato (MIT), A L Dean (GE), P G Neumann (BTL). J H Saltzer and E 
L Glaser were consultants to the triumvirate. 

1.5.      Papers at 1965 FJCC
Special session
Public reaction
<<more, ask PGN?>>

2.      Initial construction
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. 

2.2.      Compilers
PL/I was chosen as the programming language in 1964. Other 
possibilities were a port of MAD or a port of AED-0. 
<<How was PL/I chosen??>> 
We got permission from IBM to reprint their language manual. The full 
PL/I language was harder to implement than expected. A contract was 
awarded to Digitek to produce a PL/I compiler; Bell Labs administered 
the contract. The contractor assigned two people and had not produced 
a compiler after a year. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy created a backup 
plan for a PL/I compiler, using McClure's TMG language on the 7094. 
This language was called EPL (Early PL/I); the compiler produced 
output in EPLBSA (EPL Bootstrap Assembler). Compilation was very slow 
and language features were limited. 

2.3.      Management
(See First Seven Years). 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. <<Who was on this 
besides Butler Lampson?>> 

3.      Use at MIT
3.1.      Bell labs withdraws (4/69)
<<more>>

3.2.      TOSS summer study (7/69)
The Cambridge Project was an ARPA-funded political science computing 
project. They worked on stuff like survey analysis and simulation, led 
by 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. 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. 

<<get info from Art Evans on Programming Linguistics, 6.231>>

3.3.      MIT usage (10/69)
The system was finally opened for paying customers in October 1969, 
several years late. 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. 

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 Lyonnaise are probably also candidates. (info 
from John Klensin) 

4.      Use at RADC (8/70)
The second 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. 

5.      Honeywell (1970)
GE sold its computer business to Honeywell in 1970.
<<more>>

6.      Commercial announcement (1/73)
There were several commercial announcements. The Honeywell 
6180 was announced in January 1973 at the Boston Museum of 
Science.

7.      The 70s
7.1.      New Storage System (28.0, 2/76)
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. 

7.2.      MRDS
Multics had the first commercial relational database, the Multics 
Relational Data Store, implemented by Jim Weeldreyer and Oris Friesen 
of Honewyell Phoenix in about 1977. MRDS included a report writer 
called LINUS written by Jim Falksen. <<more, ask Weeldreyer or 
Friesen>> 

7.3.      Multics installations
7.3.1.      Air Force Data Services Center
<<more>>

7.3.2.      General Motors
<<more,  ORAS>>

7.3.3.      Ford
This is far from a comprehensive history of the Ford site, but I
thought I'd mention that Ford had Multics twice.  In 1973-1975 Multics
arrived on a trial basis that included a certain amount of joint OS
development.  The Ford systems group had a fair knowledge of operating
systems, having originally supported the Ford Philco 212 OS, and
welcomed the chance to contribute to this interesting new system
called Multics.  To this day the following software products are
licensed from Bull at no charge to Ford because of the joint
development effort on MR3:

          AGS6802   ISTAT
          SGC6800   Multics Comm System
          SGC6803   Bisync support, MCS
          SGC6804   G115 support, MCS
          SGE6800   Multics Software Extensions
          SGE6802   RJE facility
          SGL6801   Fortran-77
          SGL6802   Basic
          SGS6800   Multics Exec
          SGS6801   GCOS TSS Environment

Alas, Multics fell victim to economic and experimental woes.  Because
it was an experimental/evaluation system users were reluctant to write
applications for it.  Because there were no applications for it, when
the economy dipped and money got tight there was no justification for
keeping it.

It came back in sunnier economic times several years later.  In 1978
applications were written on System-M, then moved to Ford's own
Multics system when it arrived later that year.  By this time MR6.5
was available and Multics was a more robust product.  The next year
Multics was moved by upgrading from Level 68s to 8/70Ms into its new
home in the Engineering Computer Center.  It grew into three systems,
with capacity and usage peaking around 1989.  The last major upgrade
was to convert from 501 to 3381 model disks, convert IOMs to IMUs, and
upgrade to MR12.1 in 1988.

Most of the Multics applications were migrated to Sequent systems, and
in 1995 only one Multics system (two applications) remains.

(Bruce Sanderson, Ford Motor Co)

7.3.4.      Industrial Nucleonics
<<more>>

7.3.5.      University of SW Louisiana
<<more>>

7.3.6.      French university system
<<more>>

7.3.7.      <<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
Report commissioned by HIS corporate in 1978 to decide long range plan
for LISD.  Popek & Rossman principal authors.  Report recommended 
capping CP-6, GCOS-3, and GCOS-4 and concentrating on Multics.  LISD
whitewashed & committeed the thing to death.
(TVV posted a long story about the Palyn report in May 93.)

8.      The 80s
8.1.      Sites
<<more>>

9.      Termination and Rescue Attempts
9.1.    Honeywell Flower (85)
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. (Olin Sibert) 

9.2.    Multics Company Merlin
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. (Olin Sibert) 

9.3.    The Michael Tague project
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.  (Olin Sibert, John Gintell)

9.4.    Opus (86)
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 codenamed "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 cancelled 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, and now known as Wang Federal) built a highly secure 
system on the same DPS6plus 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.  (Olin Sibert, John Ata)

The XTS-300 (STOP 4.1) has also been awarded a B3 rating after the 
sucessful 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.  (John Ata)

9.5.    Multics on Cyber 180 study (85)
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. (Olin Sibert) 

9.6.    Multics on Sequent (or other Intel 386/486) (85-87)
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.  (Olin Sibert)

9.7.    Multics on DPS90
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. (Olin Sibert) 

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).  (Vince Scarafino)

9.8.    Honeywell and Bull
Honeywell decided that it was more comfortable making 
thermostats and sold its computer division to its French partner
Bull.  The French government is a major investor in Bull. 
<<more>>

9.9.    Maintenance to Calgary (4/88)
In 1988, Honeywell transferred maintenance of Multics to the 
University of Calgary, which set up a separate corporation called ACTC 
Inc. to do this. The director of ACTC is Arun Gatha. ACTC has its own 
Multics system, and "intends to be the last Multics machine running." 
<<more>>
