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Multics was a joint effort of Bell Labs, GE, and MIT to develop a time-sharing operating system on mainframes in the 1960s. It was one of the first multiplexed operating systems to use page segmentation storage protocols. Multics pioneered many technological advances but became obsolete in the 1990s due to the advent of personal computers and affordable server and network systems. However, Multics’ development pioneered many computer functions used today.
Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or Multics, was one of the best examples of developing a time-sharing operating system on mainframes during most of the 1960s. The development of the system was a joint effort of three well-respected entities and was one of the first multiplexed operating systems to employ the practice of page segmentation storage protocols. While this mainframe operating system solution is now considered obsolete, Multics pioneered many of the technological advances of the last two decades of the 20th century.
Multics was the result of the joint efforts of three respected organizations. With the first research efforts occurring in the early 1960s, Multics began to take shape, with each of the three resources contributing to the ongoing development. Bell Labs, General Electric Corporation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) shared the development of various aspects of the operating system, with testing often performed at facilities related to each entity. GE-manufactured hardware served as the platform for the system.
In 1969, Multics is fully functional and ready to install. During this time, GE sold its computer development arm. Honeywell, which bought the GE facilities, continued to supply hardware to the project and was influential in the final design. The first commercial Multics system was made available in 1973.
By today’s standards, the Multics system didn’t offer a lot of power. However, the operating system was a huge advantage over the alternatives at the time. The first commercial system, known as the 6180, featured a memory capacity of 768 kilobytes, eight megabytes of mass storage, and a hard drive with a capacity of just over one and a half megabytes.
For the rest of the decade, improvements were offered from time to time that expanded the resources of the Multics operating system. This included the development of one of the first relational databases and was dubbed the Multics Relational Data Store, or MRDS. More disk capacity was also added, providing additional power to companies that had come to rely on mainframe systems to accelerate core business functions.
Unfortunately, Multics didn’t adapt very well to the technological innovations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The advent of the personal computer and affordable server and network systems that could do everything that Multics could do and offer more resources soon overtook the older operating system. At the turn of the new century, Multics was mostly considered obsolete.
While Multics is no longer a commonly used operating system, the forward thinking associated with the development of the system pioneered many of the computer functions that people use every day both at home and in the workplace. Some of the essential knowledge about the function of memory, database structure, and data storage all have their origins in the research that helped bring Multics to life.
