Multics - Project History

Project History

Multics was developed initially for the GE-645 mainframe, a 36-bit system; later, it was supported on the Honeywell 6180 series machines. "With Multics they tried to have a much more versatile and flexible operating system, and it failed miserably," said Dr. Peter H. Salus, author of the definitive history of Unix's early years. This position, however, has been widely discredited in the computing community as many of the technical innovations of the Multics project have found their way into modern commercial computing systems.

Bell Labs pulled out of the project in 1969; some of the people who had worked on it there went on to create the Unix system. Multics development continued at MIT and General Electric.

In 1970, Honeywell bought General Electric's computer division, released a better hardware base, and continued system development until 1985. About 80 multimillion-dollar sites were installed, at universities, industry, and government sites. The French university system had quite a few installations in the early 1980s. After Honeywell stopped supporting Multics, users migrated to other systems, including Unix. The last Multics machine was shut down on October 30, 2000, at the Canadian Department of National Defence.

In 1985, Multics was issued certification as a B2 level secure operating system using the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria from the National Computer Security Center (NCSC) a division of the NSA, the first operating system evaluated to this level.

Multics was distributed in 1975 to 2000 by Groupe Bull in Europe, and by Bull HN Information Systems Inc. in the United States. In 2006 Bull SAS open sourced Multics versions MR10.2, MR11.0, MR12.0, MR12.1, MR12.2, MR12.3, MR12.4 & MR12.5.