Does anyone still use Multics??

[Daniel Freedman]

In article <6392 at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>, steve at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Steve DeJarnett) writes:
> 
> Are there any sites out there that run Multics??  Is there any source code 
> available for it (since I'm asking).  I presume it would have been written
> in something like FORTRAN.  

Well, we have a 5 processor Multics system which we use as a general
purpose mainframe.  We also do a lot of Multics maintenance and development
work for Honeywell (I guess it must be Honeywell Bull these days).
Multics itself was written in PL/I except for those bits written in
ALM, Multics' assembly language.  The funny thing about Multics is
that although it is 20 years old, there are oodles of features present
on Multics that you won't find anywhere else.  Even if you do find
them elsewhere, they often aren't as good.  I remember being
particularly impressed by the whole organization of the system.  With
all operating systems, one asks one's self "at what level do things
stop looking clean and get hacky"?  With Multics, it's clean all the
way down to the hardware.  Incidentally, anyone thinking of writing an
emacs should look at Multics emacs.  It's the best that I've ever seen
(if you are on the net Bernie Greenberg, thankyou).  If you have
specific questions, feel free to mail them to me, and I'll do my best
to answer them, although it's been a little while since I used Multics
to write any programs.
Dan Freedman
University of Calgary Computer Science Department
2500 University Drive N.W.			      freedman at cpsc.UCalgary.CA
Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4	...!{ubc-vision,ihnp4}!alberta!calgary!freedman