On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 6:15 PM jcs <lists@irreal.org> wrote:
Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> writes:
> So, it looks like someone has gone and started running a multics
> instance:
>
> http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/semibug/2018-August/000288.html
>
> That’s interesting, and y’all may even have been aware of it.

Yup. A few Multics sites are publicly accessible; the one at the Living Computer Museum has a guest account, a few others one can get an account if one asks the site administrator nicely. Some amount of Multics maintenance has been restarted.

> But, I was thinking that Multics was a failed predecessor of
> unix and it’s craziness an inspiration for how unix isn’t
> multics... straighten me out :)

Multics was the immediate predecessor of Unix, and one can certainly see some of the influence, though of course many of the details are different.

Failed only in the sense that the Labs withdrew from the project.
Honeywell, which bought out GE's computer division, sold Multics
systems, although I don't remember them being very successful.

The multicians.org site has a lot of good information on Multics and what ultimately become of it. (jcs probably knows this already; I'm writing this more for general information of those who may not have been following these developments.) The TL;DR was that a smallish number of sites eventually installed Multics and it was a moderate success for Honeywell, but for the reasons that have been mentioned (failure to market, lack of management understanding, tied to a decomposing architecture well past its prime) it never carved out more than a niche.

The real mystery is what it's running on. Multics originally ran
on the GE/H 600(0) systems. I doubt any are still around. It's
probably a simulator but I've never heard of one for the H6000.

The last working hardware installation was shut down in, I think, 2000. An DPS8/M emulator has been built on top of the SIMH framework, and is what folks are running Multics on. Some more details are here: https://multicians.org/simulator.html.

        - Dan C.