On Sat, 1 Sep 2018, John P. Linderman wrote: I have never seen a full-blown PL/I compiler (only subsets), and I recall being told that there never will be one because it is simply impossible, given the spec. Naturally I am happy to be proven wrong on this. -- Dave

On 9/2/18, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: IBM had PL/I compilers for TOS, DOS, and OS on System/360, and for DOS/VS and OS/VS on System/370. If those weren't full implementations of the original spec, they were pretty close. IBM PL/I had a good number of what I call toxic language features, such as the DEFAULT statement (which was Fortran's IMPLICIT on steroids). Most PL/I shops had as part of their coding standards a set of language features banned from the code. The ANSI standard eliminated a lot of these, although it also threw out some useful features such as iSUB defining and by-name structure assignment. One of my favourite features was sterling pictures, with pounds, shillings, and pence fields (represented internally as a packed decimal value in pence). Sterling pictures weren't finally deprecated in the IBM PL/I compilers until 1979, IIRC. -Paul W,.

On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 6:15 PM jcs <lists(a)irreal.org> wrote: 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. 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. 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 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.

A simulator. Originally running Multics release 12.5, but a dedicated team of new and original Multicians have completed the Y2K transition, fixed some bugs and added some features, so now running release 12.6f. All of the original systems are believed to be destroyed with the exception of DOCKMASTER (an NSA machine), now in possession of the National Cryptographic Museum, but warehoused. A video of the Living Computer Museum's Multics emulator (with maintenance panel) booting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jni7wk7bjxA At least one of the new Multicians (me) is subscribed to TUHS. -- Charles