Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964. The last known running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000.


Initial planning and development for Multics started in 1964. Originally it was a cooperative project led by MIT (with Fernando Corbató) along with General Electric and Bell Labs. Bell Labs dropped out in 1969 and in 1970 GE's computer business including Multics was taken over by Honeywell.

Multics was conceived as a commercial product for GE and became one for Honeywell but not a very successful one. Due to its many novel and valuable ideas Multics had a great impact in the computer field even though it was then much derided by its critics.

It had numerous features intended to result in high availability so that it would produce a computing utility similar to the telephone and electricity services. Modular hardware structure and software architecture were used to achieve this. The system could grow in size by simply adding more of the appropriate resource - computing power, main memory, disk storage, etc. Separate Access Control Lists on every file provided flexible information sharing and complete privacy when needed. It had a number of standard mechanisms to allow engineers to analyse the performance of the system as well as a number of adaptive performance optimisation mechanisms.

Novel ideas

Multics implemented a single level store for data access, discarding the clear distinction between files (called segments in Multics) and process memory. The memory of a process consisted solely of segments which were mapped into its address space. To read or write to them, the process simply used normal CPU instructions, and the operating system took care of making sure that all the modifications were saved to disk. In POSIX terminology, it was as if every file was mmap()ed; however, in Multics there was no concept of process memory, separate from the memory used to hold mapped-in files, as Unix has. All memory in the system was part of some segment, which appeared in the file system; this included the temporary scratch memory of the process, its kernel stack, etc.

One disadvantage of this was that the size of segments was limited to 256K 36-bit words (slightly more than 1 megabyte). This was due to the particular hardware architecture of the machines Multics ran on. Extra code had to be used to work on files larger than this, called multisegment files. But in the days when one megabyte of memory was prohibitively expensive, and before large databases and later huge bitmap graphics, this limit was rarely encountered.


Thus, to interact with an application running in part as a daemon (in another process), a user's process simply performed a normal procedure call instruction, to a code segment which it had dynamically linked to (a code segment which implemented some operation associated with the daemon). The code in that segment could then modify data maintained and used in the daemon. When the action necessary to commence the request was completed, a simple procedure return instruction returned control of the user's process to the user's code.



Multics was the first major operating system to be designed as a secure system from the ground up. Despite this, early versions of Multics were broken into repeatedly. This led to further work that made the system much more secure and prefigured modern security engineering techniques. Break-ins became very rare once the second-generation hardware base was adopted; it had hardware support for ring-oriented security, a multilevel refinement of the concept of master mode.

Multics was the first operating system to provide a hierarchical file system, and filenames could be of almost arbitrary length and syntax; a given file or directory could have multiple names (typically a long and short form); and symbolic links between directories were also supported. It was the first to use the now-standard concept of per-process stacks in the kernel, with a separate stack for each security ring. It was also one of the first written in a high level language (PL/I), just after the Burroughs MCP system written in ALGOL.

Project history


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. Superficial influence of Multics on Unix is evident in many areas, including the naming of commands. But the design philosophy was quite different, focusing on keeping the system small and simple, and so correcting the perceived deficiencies of Multics. The name "Unix" (originally "Unics") is itself a hack on "Multics". The U in UNIX is rumored to stand for "Uniplexed" as opposed to the "Multiplexed" of Multics, further underscoring the designers' rejections of Multics' complexity in favor of a more straightforward and workable approach.

Honeywell bought GE'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 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 31, 2000 at the Canadian Department of National Defence.

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

Retrospective observations

It is startling that the permanently resident kernel of this powerful multiprocessor mainframe computing utility, much derided in its day as being too large and complex, was only 135 kB of code. The first MIT GE-645 had 512K words of memory (2 MB), a truly enormous amount at the time, and the kernel only used a moderate portion of Multics main memory.

The entire system, including the operating system and the complex PL/I compiler, user commands, and subroutine libraries, consisted of about 1500 source modules. These averaged roughly 200 lines of source code each, and compiled to produce a total of roughly 4.5 MB of procedure code, which though small today was fairly large by the standards of the day.


See also


Further reading

The literature contains a large number of papers about Multics, and various components of it; a fairly complete list is available here The most important and/or informative ones are listed below.

Technical details



External links

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