[rescue] Interesting bit on Multics

[Dave McGuire]

On Friday, October 17, 2003, at 11:15 PM, Francisco Javier 
Mesa-Martinez wrote:
>> So what's to stop us from changing that 10/21/2000 date... by
>> resurrecting Multics hardware and running Multics as a community
>> effort?... Cost...? Unobtainium?
>
> It was very tied to PL/1 which was a horrible language by any account,
> besides the OS was also coupled to a specific ISA support for some of 
> the
> features. I believe there were some efforts to port it to modern micros
> (read x86) and failed misserably.
>
> Besides most of the cool ideas have found their way into a few modern 
> OSs
> so I dunno what the utility of a multics re-animation would be.

   It's not clear that anyone was suggesting "utility" of any sort.  It 
is an important part of history, and as such, it should be preserved 
and studied.  I don't think anyone in their right mind would use it in 
production unless they absolutely had to.

       -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                      "My tummy hurts now, but my soul
St. Petersburg, FL                 feels a little better."     -Ed