[SunRescue] multics is dead, long live multics!

[Will Jennings]

Yes, Groupe Bull is still in business... You've found the North American 
offices of Groupe Bull, which is a French company, based in Paris... And 
they make mainframes and sell rebadged RS/6000's.. The mainframes run GCOS, 
which can trace its roots to GECOS, which doesn't have much similarity to 
Multics. For one, GECOS is an older operating system, with GECOS II dating 
to about 1964. At one point, Mutlics and GCOS were to have a common code 
base, but this never happened. GCOS is simply the renaming that occured when 
GE sold the computer operations to Honeywell.. Honeywell then confused the 
picture further by calling the OS for the big machines GCOS, and calling the 
OS for the minis GCOS as well.. Multics was also available for large 
systems, but you couldn't run Multics without also running GCOS, though I'm 
talking about GCOS running on the DPS-6 mini which was required as a FEP. 
Hope that helps... If anyone has any Honeywell manuals at all, please let me 
know, I love the Honeywell machines and am trying to research their history 
further...

Will J
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