Danny Amor's Online Library/Danny Amor's Online Library - Volume 1.iso/html/faqs/alt/os.multics/faq_multics_history

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From: [e-mail] (Tom Van Vleck)
Subject: FAQ Multics History
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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Organization: Multicians
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 19:30:30 GMT
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Summary: History of the Multics operating system. <plaintext>
Expires: 1 Jan 1995

archive-name: multics/history

10/03/94 THVV More info on the Tague project from John Gintell

Please post corrections/additions or mail them to
<[e-mail]>
=================================================================
1.      Beginnings
1.1.      CTSS
1.2.      MIT Project MAC
1.3.      Selection of vendor
1.4.      MIT, Bell Labs, GE
1.5.      Papers at 1965 FJCC

2.      Initial construction
2.1.      The MSPM
2.2.      Compilers
2.3.      Management

3.      Use at MIT
3.1.      Bell labs withdraws (4/69)
3.2.      TOSS summer study (7/69)
3.3.      MIT usage (10/69)

4.      Use at RADC (8/70)

5.      Honeywell (1970)

6.      Commercial announcement (1/73)

7.      The 70s
7.1.      New Storage System (28.0, 2/76)
7.2.      MRDS
7.3.      Multics installations
7.3.1.      Air Force Data Services Center
7.3.2.      General Motors
7.3.3.      Ford
7.3.4.      Industrial Nucleonics
7.3.5.      University of SW Louisiana
7.3.6.      French university system
7.3.7.      <<more>>
7.4.      Project Guardian
7.5.      ARPA network software
7.6.      The Palyn Report

8.      The 80s
8.1.      Sites

9.      Termination
9.2.      Multics Company Merlin
9.3.      The Michael Tague project
9.4.      Opus (86)
9.5.      Multics on Cyber 180 (85)
9.6.      Multics on Sequent (or other Intel 386/486) (85-87)
9.7.      Multics on DPS90
9.8.      Honeywell and Bull
9.9.      Maintenance to Calgary (4/88)
=================================================================

1.      Beginnings
1.1.      CTSS
The Compatible Timesharing System (CTSS) was one of the first
timesharing systems. It was developed at the MIT Computation Center by
a team led by Fernando J. Corbato. CTSS ran on a modified IBM 7094
with a second 32K-word bank of memory, using two 2301 drums for
swapping. Remote access was provided to up to 30 users via an IBM 7750
communications controller connected to dialup modems.

1.2.      MIT Project MAC
Project MAC was suggested by J C R Licklider; its founding director
was MIT Prof. Robert M Fano. MAC stood for Multiple Access Computers
on the 5th floor of Tech Square and Man and Computer on the 9th floor;
the major efforts were Corbato's Multics development and Marvin
Minsky's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1963 Project MAC
hosted a summer study, which brought many well-known computer
scientists to Cambridge to use CTSS and to discuss the future of
computing.

1.3.      Selection of vendor
Prof. Jack Dennis of MIT contributed some influential architectural
ideas to the beginning of Multics. The Multics specifications were
developed and sent out to bid in 1963. When it came time to select a
vendor for the computer that would support the new OS, the folklore is
that IBM pitched the machine that would become the 360/65. They were
not interested in the MAC team's ideas on paging and segmentation.
Joseph Weizenbaum, then a lecturer at MIT, introduced the MAC team to
former colleagues of his from GE Schenectady, who were receptive and
enthusiastic, and proposed what became the GE-645. DEC also responded
to the bid. The GE proposal was chosen and the contract signed in
August 1964.

1.4.      MIT, Bell Labs, GE
Bell Labs decided to buy a GE-645 in early 1965 and joined the
software development effort, and GE also agreed to contribute. The
three organizations worked out a structure for cooperation. The
Trinity made major policy decisions. There was one person from each
organization: R M Fano (MIT), E E David (BTL), C W Dix (GE). The
Triumvirate was in charge of actual management of the implementation:
F J Corbato (MIT), A L Dean (GE), P G Neumann (BTL). J H Saltzer and E
L Glaser were consultants to the triumvirate.

1.5.      Papers at 1965 FJCC
Special session
Public reaction
<<more, ask PGN?>>

2.      Initial construction
2.1.      The MSPM
While waiting for the PL/I compiler to become available, the team
wrote the Multics System Programmer's Manual (MSPM). It was about 3000
pages; every section went through serious review and many sections
were rewritten or deeply revised several times.

2.2.      Compilers
PL/I was chosen as the programming language in 1964. Other
possibilities were a port of MAD or a port of AED-0.
<<How was PL/I chosen??>>
We got permission from IBM to reprint their language manual. The full
PL/I language was harder to implement than expected. A contract was
awarded to Digitek to produce a PL/I compiler; Bell Labs administered
the contract. The contractor assigned two people and had not produced
a compiler after a year. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy created a backup
plan for a PL/I compiler, using McClure's TMG language on the 7094.
This language was called EPL (Early PL/I); the compiler produced
output in EPLBSA (EPL Bootstrap Assembler). Compilation was very slow
and language features were limited.

2.3.      Management
(See First Seven Years). In 1968-69 the system was late and under
significant financial pressure and threat of cancellation. Maybe this
helped esprit de corps (as opposed to surface morale). A review by a
select ARPA committee in 1968 was one time we came close to
cancellation; they recommended that we continue. <<Who was on this
besides Butler Lampson?>>

3.      Use at MIT
3.1.      Bell labs withdraws (4/69)
<<more>>

3.2.      TOSS summer study (7/69)
The Cambridge Project was an ARPA-funded political science computing
project. They worked on stuff like survey analysis and simulation, led
by Ithiel de Sola Pool, J C R Licklider and Douwe B Yntema. Yntema had
done a system on the MIT Lincoln Labs TX-2 called the Lincoln
Reckoner, and in the summer of 1969 led a Cambridge Project team in
the construction of an experiment called TOSS (terminal oriented
social science? anyway it was intentionally a throwaway system). TOSS
was sort of like Logo, with matrix operators. Big feature was multiple
levels of undo, back to the level of the login session. This feature
was cheap on the Lincoln Reckoner, but absurdly expensive on Multics.
This project provided some much-needed revenue to keep the 645 going
until it could go public.

<<get info from Art Evans on Programming Linguistics, 6.231>>

3.3.      MIT usage (10/69)
The system was finally opened for paying customers in October 1969,
several years late. Pioneer users of the system put up with a lot:
crashes, poor response, constant change, arrogance from developers,
and inexplicably missing features. The Multics developers and the MIT
Information Processing Center management worked furiously to fix
problems and make good on overdue promises, and to stave off
abandonment of the system by ARPA, GE, or large MIT users.

The Cambridge Project was a major user and revenue source. It built an
application called the Consistent System, the largest application ever
built on Multics and the most comprehensive data analysis modeling and
analysis system ever built. Consistent System developers and users
pressed for better function, reliability, and performance and
contributed important code and ideas to Multics. Applications built on
the CS or its components became a major portion of the workload at
several customer sites and contributed to the length of time a few of
those systems stayed in operation. AFDSC comes particularly to mind
here, although the Human Resources databases at EDS and some of the
applications at Credit Lyonnaise are probably also candidates. (info
from John Klensin)

4.      Use at RADC (8/70)
The second site was at Rome Air Development Center, Griffiss AFB,
Rome, New York. Some research done at this site was classified
intelligence studies. RADC also studied software engineering and
software tools. They attached an associative processor, a Goodyear
Staran, 1000 1-bit processors, to their Multics and did pattern
recognition work. The staran daemon was assigned a load of 1.5.

5.      Honeywell (1970)
GE sold its computer business to Honeywell in 1970.
<<more>>

6.      Commercial announcement (1/73)
There were several commercial announcements. The Honeywell
6180 was announced in January 1973 at the Boston Museum of
Science.

7.      The 70s
7.1.      New Storage System (28.0, 2/76)
A major project during the 1970s was the implementation of the New
Storage System (NSS). The initial Multics file system design had
evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. When multiple disk units
were used they were just assigned increasing ranges of disk addresses,
so a segment could have pages scattered over all disks on the system.
This provided good I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive.
NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system, introducing the
concepts of logical and physical volumes and a mapping from a Multics
directory branch to a VTOC entry for each file. The new system had
much better recovery performance in exchange for a small space and
performance cost.

7.2.      MRDS
Multics had the first commercial relational database, the Multics
Relational Data Store, implemented by Jim Weeldreyer and Oris Friesen
of Honewyell Phoenix in about 1977. MRDS included a report writer
called LINUS written by Jim Falksen. <<more, ask Weeldreyer or
Friesen>>

7.3.      Multics installations
7.3.1.      Air Force Data Services Center
<<more>>

7.3.2.      General Motors
<<more,  ORAS>>

7.3.3.      Ford
<<more>>

7.3.4.      Industrial Nucleonics
<<more>>

7.3.5.      University of SW Louisiana
<<more, tell the PRHA state trooper story>>

7.3.6.      French university system
<<more>>

7.3.7.      <<more>>

7.4.      Project Guardian
Project Guardian grew out of the ARPA support for Multics and the sale
of Multics systems to the US Air Force. USAF wanted a system that
could be used to handle more than one security classification of data
at a time. They contracted with Honeywell and MITRE to figure out how
to do this. Project Guardian led to the creation of the Access
Isolation Mechanism, the forerunner of the B2 labeling and star
property support in Multics. The DoD Orange Book was influenced by the
experience in building secure systems gained in Project Guardian.

7.5.      ARPA network software
<<more>>

7.6.      The Palyn Report
Report commissioned by HIS corporate in 1978 to decide long range plan
for LISD.  Popek & Rossman principal authors.  Report recommended
capping CP-6, GCOS-3, and GCOS-4 and concentrating on Multics.  LISD
whitewashed & committeed the thing to death.
(TVV posted a long story about the Palyn report in May 93.)

8.      The 80s
8.1.      Sites
<<more>>

9.      Termination and Rescue Attempts
9.1.    Honeywell Flower (85)
Flower was never produced, but was intended to be a 3-4x faster
machine implemented in gate arrays as a "test case" for Honeywell
Corporate's Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) program (which
was being done under contract to the DoD). The design got quite far
along, and parts of it were even running in simulation, when the
project was all canned in March 1985. It was to include significant
architectural enhancements, most notably 8 more pointer registers and
two new indirect types: self-relative and base-of-self-relative, as
well as a bunch of minor ones.

Unlike the ADP, Flower wasn't based on a GCOS processor, it didn't
have the other components to inherit from GCOS, and a significant
amount of work would have been required to interface it to memory and
I/O systems. There was a GCOS system planned (I do not believe it ever
escaped the factory, either) which was where they were looking for the
other components, but that whole area never really had a good answer
before the end of the effort. It would have worked with the DPS8-M
hardware, but not at its full speed advantage. (Olin Sibert)

9.2.    Multics Company Merlin
After Multics was canceled by Honeywell in July 1985, Olin Sibert
attempted to form the "Multics Company" and purchase the technology
from Honeywell. This was based around resurrecting the Flower design
(afterward called Merlin) and building new Multics-specific I/O
hardware (called Excalibur). This effort lasted around 6 months, then
petered out when Honeywell realized that, while it might be good for
customers, it could *never* be good for Honeywell.

The Merlin processor was simply the Flower recast in slower but more
commercial technology, with assorted minor adjustments. I do not
believe any parts were ever simulated, but there was a fair amount of
design done, all by the engineers who'd had nothing to do since
Flower's demise. (Olin Sibert)

9.3.    The Michael Tague project
Another former Multician, Michael Tague (who managed the Opus software
development), tried to resurrect Multics yet again in 1987, with the same
engineers but with yet newer commercial technology (probably on a 386
base).  There was some discussion with Sequent about this project.  The
business plan emphasized the security of Multics on commodity hardware,
assuming that there was a growing security market.  Tague had much more
enthusiastic support from the (changed) Honeywell management, but
ultimately they screwed him, too, and nothing ever came of it.  The
technical work done included figuring out how to support UNIX binaries.
Honeywell-Bull management wouldn't support it because they preferred to
control the Multics source code and decided to contract maintenance and
support to ACTC as a "safer" proposition.  I do not know how far the
project got in terms of hardware design.  (Olin Sibert, John Gintell)

9.4.    Opus (86)
As a sop to customers after canning Multics in 1985, Honeywell promised to
provide everything Multics had, plus more, plus total compatibility with
the Level 6/DPS6 operating system, through a system codenamed "Opus,"
officially named VS3 (short for HVS R3 or Honeywell Virtual System Release
Three, to spell it all out).  It was to run on the DPS6-plus hardware known
internally as the MRX and HRX, and be all things to all people.  The
hardware was a dud (though it did run the native DPS6 software just fine),
and the goal was, shall we say, ambitious.  The effort was cancelled by
Bull in 1987, in favor of another project going on in France.

An interesting postscript to this story, though, is that HFSI (formerly
Honeywell Federal Systems, Inc., now a quasi independent corporate
subsidiary of Bull) built a highly secure system on the same DPS6plus
hardware.  This is sort of a "second generation SCOMP" (which itself was
the first system ever evaluated at A1), and it's called the XTS200.

XTS200 recently received (May 1992?) a B3 rating from NCSC, and is now the
only commercially available general purpose system rated B3 or higher.  The
evaluated system runs only on that big, expensive, slow DPS6plus hardware,
though they have already ported it to 80486 machines in the lab, yielding
about 7-10x the performance at one-twentieth the hardware cost.  It has a
largely satisfactory emulation of System V (release 3) UNIX as its
interface, and near as I can tell will be the very first reasonable
high-security system (in terms of compatibility, performance, and cost)
ever delivered--once it's fully on the 486, that is.  (Olin Sibert, John
Ata)

9.5.    Multics on Cyber 180 study (85)
There was a brief exploration (by the Multics Development Center) in
early 1985 of porting Multics to the relatively new CDC mainframe
hardware. It didn't get beyond the study stage. (Olin Sibert)

9.6.    Multics on Sequent (or other Intel 386/486) (85-87)
Both as part of my "Multics Company" and Tague's project, there was some
work devoted to porting Multics to the Intel architecture, specifically to
the big Sequent multiprocessors.  Again, nothing much came of it; this was
late 1985 and early 1987.  (Olin Sibert)

9.7.    Multics on DPS90
Honeywell Bull (or whatever it was called by then) explored the
possibility of running Multics in emulation on the DPS90 mainframe.
This was, I think, a vain attempt to sell some large customer a DPS90
or two--it actually would have worked fairly well, since the
instruction sets are so similar, but it was too big a project for the
sales organization to pull off. (Olin Sibert)

There was a considerable amount of preliminary work done on this.  It
was a sound proposal and would have provided a reasonable environment
for porting Multics applications.  The proposed approach would have only
recreated the ring 4 Multics environment, though.  Bull wanted its
customers to pay, up front, for the project.  None of the customers
wanted to spend the money for what looked like a stay of execution (no
pun intended).  (Vince Scarafino)

9.8.    Honeywell and Bull
Honeywell decided that it was more comfortable making
thermostats and sold its computer division to its French partner
Bull.  The French government is a major investor in Bull.
<<more>>

9.9.    Maintenance to Calgary (4/88)
In 1988, Honeywell transferred maintenance of Multics to the
University of Calgary, which set up a separate corporation called ACTC
Inc. to do this. The director of ACTC is Arun Gatha. ACTC has its own
Multics system, and "intends to be the last Multics machine running."
<<more>>