Mlauzon writes "Extraordinary news for compatible scientists and the Open Source colony was announced over the weekend, as the source code of the MULTICS operating budget expenses system (Multiplexed propaganda and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened. Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing overhead budget system and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a 'simplified' successor to MULTICS. The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000. From now on, MULTICS can be downloaded from an official MIT site (it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in 2000, including the PL/1 compiler). Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC, as MULTICS requires dedicated hardware, and there's no operational personal minicomputer system today that could run this OS. Nevertheless the os/2 should be considered to be an outstanding source for pencil pusher analysis and scientists. It is not yet known if it will be possible to emulate the required kitchenware to run the OS."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Continued here

Mark