Multics /muhl'tiks/ n.
[from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An
early time-sharing operating
system co-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and
Bell Laboratories as a successor to CTSS. The design was first presented in 1965,
planned for operation in 1967, first operational in 1969, and
took several more years to achieve respectable performance and
stability.
Multics was very innovative for its time -- among other
things, it provided a hierarchical file system with access
control on individual files and introduced the idea of treating
all devices uniformly as special files. It was also the first OS
to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the only
general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating by the
NSA (see Orange Book).
Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging
that second-system
effect had bloated Multics to the point of practical
unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in 1972 after
buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful:
at its peak in the 1980s, there were between 75 and 100 Multics
sites, each a multi-million dollar mainframe.
One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken
Thompson, and Unix deliberately
carried through and extended many of Multics' design ideas;
indeed, Thompson described the very name `Unix' as `a weak pun on
Multics'. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics
design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See
also brain-damaged and GCOS.
MIT ended its development association with Multics in 1977.
Honeywell sold its computer business to Bull in the mid 80s, and
development on Multics was stopped in 1988. Four Multics sites
were known to be still in use as late as 1998. There is a Multics
page at http://www.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/multics.html.
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multitask n.
Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers,
to describe a person doing several things at once (but see thrash). The term `multiplex', from
communications technology (meaning to handle more than one
channel at the same time), is used similarly.