[TUHS] Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?

[John Levine via TUHS]

It appears that steve jenkin via TUHS <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> said:
>
>	could something like C have improved MULTICS or helped it's success in the marketplace?

I doubt it. Multics was doomed because it was tied to the GE 645. The addresses
were too small (18 bit offset per segment, about a megabyte) and everyone was
moving to 8 bit byte addressed architectures.  Changing the programming language
wouldn't have made any difference.  Unix was portable partly because it was written
in C, but just as much becase the targets were all 8 bit machines with addressing
and data formats similar to the PDP-11.

PL/I was a surprisingly popular system programming language. At the same time
Ken and Dennis were rewriting Unix in C, IBM was rewriting OS/360 in PL/S, which
was a PL/I subset with some extensions for system programming. 

R's,
John