Does anyone still use Multics??

[Barry Margolin]

In article <6392 at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> steve at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Steve DeJarnett) writes:
>	With the recent discussions about old GE systems and where GECOS came 
>from, I started to wonder if anyone still used Multics on any systems.  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.  
>
>	We hypothesized that maybe Bell Labs or MIT might be.

Honeywell Bull still has about 50 Multics customers, and a total of
about 70 systems (there are a few internal systems, and some customers
have more than one).  MIT discontinued its Multics service last
winter.  As far as I know, Bell Labs NEVER had a Multics system of
their own (they got out of the project pretty early).

There are still five Multics systems at the Pentagon, several each at
Ford Motor Company and Electronic Data Systems (the computer
subsidiary of GM, which also runs GM's internal computer systems), and
about 40 systems in Europe (mostly in France).

Officially, Multics development has been capped.  However, there is
still a small group in Honeywell Bull doing support for the existing
customers.  ("Small" is relative, since there's never been more than
about 120 people in the Honeywell Multics development organization.)
There's also a group at the University of Calgary's Advanced Computing
Technology Centre doing contract work (Honeywell committed to this
before Multics was capped).

About 95% of the source code of Multics is in PL/I.  A Multics system
comes with full source code.  I don't know of any other way to get a
significant portion of it.  I'm not sure why you'd want it, either.
Not that it's bad, but what makes Multics so good is not the actual
code, but the design.  The code is not very portable, either; there's
lots of implementation-dependent code and specialized Multics
extensions, and there aren't many other full PL/I compilers out there,
anyway.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar