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MR12.6f was released on 04/02/2017. New features in this release can be found in the Software Release Bulletin (SRB):
"Release 1.0 of the simulator is now available, along with Multics release 12.6f" - http://www.multicians.org/simulator.html
via
The Register
Seminal time-sharing OS Multics - the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service - has been resurrected in a new simulator.
As The Register reported in 2011, Multics' sprang from MIT's decision to eschew an IBM mainframe, buy one from GE instead and write an OS for the machine. The operating system's source code was released in 2007, when we noted Multics' place in history as one of the first OSes "...to introduce concepts such as a hierarchical file system and dynamic linking. It was also the first to use the modern standard of per-process stacks in the kernal, with a separate stack for each security ring."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:39PM
My first interactive session with any computer was typing at a BASIC interpreter running on Multics...through an IBM Selectric typewriter terminal. Must have been mid-1970s. Before that it was card decks handed to an operator, and printouts collected sometime after the job was run.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:54PM (5 children)
They are really good at coming up with innovative ideas, and then just letting them flounder into irrelevance.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:05PM
Seems like they followed through on radar... https://www.ll.mit.edu/about/History/RadLab.html [mit.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @06:52PM (3 children)
Redmond reuses other folks' ideas--but they first strip out all the good stuff.
Unix: (Unix time starts in 1970) - Has proper permissions
Linux 1.0: Released 1994 - Reused Unix permissions
NT: Released 1993 - Lousy permissions
Windoze 95 - No permissions at all
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:37PM (2 children)
NT and 32-bit 9x were two separate lines of technology. It's not fair to say 95 was a "sequel" to NT.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:40PM
Er, *16-/32-bit 9x. You know what I mean :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:15PM
not fair to say
Looking at what I actually said, that does not included Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
It does, however, include the Post part and that's my gripe: Older but not wiser.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 12 2017, @06:26PM (1 child)
Wake me when a working Unix simulator of Xerox Alto is available..
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:10PM
https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/ContrAlto/releases [github.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 13 2017, @05:04AM (1 child)
It looks like the page size is 288 modern bytes, done word-addressable as 64 words of 36 bits each. This is tiny.
It looks like the size of a page table entry is 9 modern bytes, done as 2 words of 36 bits each. This is huge. Modern 64-bit systems use less.
The overhead is thus 1/32, which is about 3%. The 80386 had an overhead of 1/1024, which is about 0.1%. Memory was precious at the time, but they sure wasted it compared to the 80386.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Saturday July 15 2017, @04:31AM
1. There is no purpose in translating into 8-bit bytes. It's a word-oriented architecture, like the PDP-6 and PDP-10, and the original ARM. The 36 bit length was chosen for a target maximum arithmetic precision.
2. It wasn't a standard GE computer. The addressing hardware was heavily customized. Honeywell later replicated the design.
3. The 80386 didn't have paging. If you're talking about the overlapping address ranges, the comparison is invalid.
4. MULTICS mapped "external files" into memory segments, as the inverse of paging memory segments out to files. It was an amazing attempt (for the time and hardware level) to make a totally consistent architecture and drive the hardware from the philosophy, rather than deriving the approach from the available hardware.