[SunRescue] Tape drive

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, May 21, 2001 at 20:46:08 (EDT), dave at cca.org wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Tape drive
>
> Do any hobbiests run multics at home? What's the smallest machine 
> that'll run it?

There are the ever circulating rumours about Multics for i386, but I
don't know anything more about it than can be found on the WWW.  Start
at www.multicians.org.

There was still a Multics running at a consulting company called ACTC
Technologies, Inc. (later called Paragon Solutions, since acquired by
CGI Group, Inc.) in Calgary, Alberta (they were originally set up by the
University of Calgary to do Multics maintenance after IBM sold UofC a
pile of RS/6000 junk that was supposed to be better and faster than
their old Honeywell mainframe, UofC was the official maintenance site
after Honeywell gave up on Multics in 1988).  Is was supposedly shut
down on July 7, 2000.  DoD Canada supposedly had the last Multics
running up until October 30, 2000.  Long live Multics!

I don't think you could run it at home sensibly on any of the original
hardware, at least not without devoting at least 1000 sq. ft. to it, not
to mention major electricity feeds, air conditioning, etc.  Go visit the
Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View. Calif. to see the old
NSA DOCKMASTER machine.  DOCKMASTER was a pretty big machine, but even
with one CPU you can imagine how much space it would take!  ;-)

If anyone would want to run Multics at home it might be Tom Van Vleck.  :-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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