This page is for stories about Multics, pictures, etc. There is room for the contributions of many authors. Send yours to the editor.

The 6180 at MIT IPC, skin doors open, circa 1976. We usually ran the machine with doors open so the operators could see the AQ register display, which gave you an idea of the machine load, and for convenient access to the EXECUTE button, which the operator would push to enter BOS if the machine crashed. The two control panels visible are for the IOM on the left, and a CPU on the right. Note the Selectric console typewriter in the foreground with the unpainted case; this was the Field Engineering spare unit. Photo by THVV. (Click for a larger view.)

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Tom Van Vleck

How Many Users?

CTSS load and Multics performance (11/08/94, 8K)

Low Bottle Pressure

Famous drum crashes (11/08/94, 12K, 1 picture)

Phase One

The first words of Multics (07/25/95, 12K, 1 picture)

Picnics

Recreation, Nate-burgers (11/05/05, 12K, 11 pictures)

Security

How the Air Force cracked Multics security (02/15/95, 18K, 1 picture)

Tech Square

The place we worked (8/8/01, 18K, 4 pictures)

The Message Coordinator

A performance lesson (11/26/95, 9K, 2 pictures)

The Telefunken TR440

Influence on a German OS (11/08/94, 7K)

The Palyn Report

Honeywell politics & one of many close calls for Multics. (11/08/94, 13K, 2 pictures)

Hodie Natus Est Radici Frater

A famous error message (03/09/95, 12K, 1 picture)

My Multics Bio

Stuff they let me do (08/18/96, 22K)

UNIX and Multics

Our famous child. (02/05/95, 14K)

It Can Be Done

A story from the construction of NSS. Published in IEEE Computer, May 1994. (02/10/07, 7K, 1 picture)

The New Storage System

Story of a major change to Multics (02/12/95, 24K, 1 picture)

Timing Channels

A story about covert channels, and some thoughts on the star property. Poster session at IEEE TCSP conference, May 1990. (05/01/90, 12K, 2 pictures)

The Louisiana State Trooper Story

Selling computers in a rented car. (04/15/95, 9K)

Multics Printer Software

Line printers, dumps, dump analysis. (02/27/96, 21K, 2 pictures)

Pictures of the 6180

Three B&W publicity shots of the new 6180 at MIT. (06/09/96, 8K, 3 pictures)

Corby

Homage to our leader, Fernando José Corbató. (12/26/96, 19K, 10 pictures)

Home Terminals

Forty years of logging in from home. (02/17/97, 22K, 2 pictures)

The who Command

The Multics command that lists logged-in users. (09/08/97, 13K)

LCS 25th Anniversary

A great party. (02/27/02, 13K, 21 pictures)

LCS 35th Anniversary

Another great party. (04/17/99, 15K, 2 pictures)

Memorabilia

Multics loot. (01/14/07, 13K, 11 pictures)

2004 Multics Reunion

Multics reunion and dinner honoring Corby, June 19, 2004, at MIT. (06/21/04, 20K, 58 pictures)

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Rex Sanders

USGS-M Recollections

Using Multics in Menlo Park. (06/14/06, 12K)

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Alan Sawyer

Alan Sawyer's Multics Bio

Bell Canada applications programming stories. (04/23/06, 12K)

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Dee Kasiowniak

Short Operator

Converting Bell Canada applications to Multics. (12/24/04, 7K)

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Bill Schulz

Marketing Multics in the Midwest

Bill Schulz was out there selling in the snow. (10/13/04, 7K)

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Julie Jackson Sibert

Julie Jackson's Multics Bio

Another USL grad joined the team. (11/06/05, 12K, 7 pictures)

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Olin Sibert

Multics SNOBOL and the Missing END Statement

A native Multics implementation of SNOBOL. (06/14/05, 9K)

"You had to go to Radio Shack!?"

Demonstrating the Cray Station software for Ford turned out to be tricky. (05/19/04, 12K)

mxload - Read Multics Backup Tapes

Tools for reading Multics backup tapes. (12/28/04, 10K, 9 PDFs)

The Magic Finger

Helping the University of Calgary get its Multics tuned. (11/20/05, 9K)

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Lee Scheffler

Lee Scheffler Multics Bio

Multics led to an interesting career. (05/10/04, 8K)

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Rainer Schöpf

Multics REDUCE

Symbolic algebra and particle physics on Multics. (09/05/03, 9K)

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Paul Karagianis

An Obfuscated PL/I Program

A cute and hard-to-read program. (09/02/03, 7K)

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Kazuhiro Oda

Visiting Project MAC

Picture from Oda-san's visit to Project MAC in 1973. (06/28/03, 5K, 1 picture)

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Ron Riedesel

Visiting CISL

Ron's story of his visit to CISL for training in 1974, including a group picture of the developers. (02/04/03, 8K, 2 pictures, 1 PDF)

Installing USL

Ron, Paul Schramm, and John Waclawski visited USL to train customers in May, 1975. (02/28/03, 7K, 2 pictures)

Marketing Item

A promo item given to Multics sales trainees in 1976. (01/23/03, 6K, 2 pictures)

Publicity Photos

Some publicity photos from the 1970s. (02/04/03, 6K, 2 pictures)

Honeywell User News

Two spreads from the Honeywell User News describing the first Multics sale in Europe, the first sale in Canada, and some of our management. (02/04/03, 6K, 2 pictures)

Snow Joke

Multics in the Minneapolis snow in 1979. (02/13/03, 6K, 1 picture)

Marketing Successes

Marketing sucesses in the 1970s: articles on marketing strategy, the USGS sale, and MRDS. (03/11/03, 7K, 1 picture, 3 PDFs)

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Dick Hill

Honeywell Management

Dick Hill, one of the first Multics Program Managers, describes the power struggles among the upper management of Honeywell, which he observed from up close. (03/03/03, 15K, 1 picture)

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Bernd Ulmann

The Multics-Installation at the Center for Data-Processing of the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz

Bernd Ulmann has a bunch of pictures of the Mainz machine and a nice story of how he and his friend Ingo got involved with the DPS-8. (11/14/02, 24K, 16 pictures)

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Ken Horton

Summer 1977: I was a Multics Intern

Ken's dream summer in Puerto Rico only got as far as Camelback Road. (08/15/02, 8K, 4 pictures)

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Randy Saunders

Using Ring 5

Randy's story of using rings to protect a source control database on the CNO machine. (07/09/02, 7K)

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Peter Flass

Organick's Book

How to get a copy of Organick's 1972 book on Multics from MIT Press. Peter Flass. Updated with information from Dan'l Miller on the PDF version. (11/15/01, 9K)

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Chris Tavares

Cryptic Messages From Antiquity

Funny, didactic, and arrogant compiler error messages. Chris Tavares. (03/25/2001, 8K)

Origin Of The Cookie Monster

A legendary hack, with some security implications, by Chris Tavares. (03/15/95, 8K)

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Tom Rykken

Flower

The story of Flower, a never shipped Multics CPU circa 1984. Tom Rykken. (02/09/01, 9K)

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Louis Pouzin

The Origin of the Shell

The genesis of one of the key facilities of time-sharing systems. Louis Pouzin. (11/27/00, 8K)

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Don Wagner

The Spirit of Multics

A remark by Don Wagner on the occasion of the shutdown of DND-H. Don Wagner. (10/10/2000, 5K, 1 picture)

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Albert Maggio

St. John's

An article from the Honeywell Communicator, an internal marketing newsletter, from August 1981, announcing the sale to St. John's University, and a picture of the machine room. Courtesy of Albert Maggio. (07/20/2000, 6K, 2 pictures)

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Bill Eaton

GE-645 Circuit Board

A photograph of an actual board from the Bell Labs GE-645, courtesy of Bill Eaton. (07/04/2000, 5K, 1 picture)

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Bob Mullen

The Multics Scheduler

Three generations of the Multics CPU scheduling algorithm. Bob Mullen. (03/05/2000, 23K, 1 picture)

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Eric Manning

The 645 Chip

Story of a plan by Honeywell to build a 645 chip in 1984, by Eric Manning. (02/01/2000, 6K)

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Jerry Saltzer

Multics Leap Year Calculations

Details of the Multics calendar clock calculations, by Jerry Saltzer. (01/05/2000, 7K)

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Jean Bellec

Shangri-La and the Paris 645

The "merger," Bull's midrange systems, and the Paris Multics system, by Jean Bellec. (10/08/99, 10K, 1 picture)

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Robert Matern

MacLisp at ENWGS

Description of source code management tools in Multics Emacs and MacLisp, by Robert Matern. (04/22/98, 7K)

ENWGS Humor

Robert Matern preserved several examples of Multics humor from NWGS. (05/11/98, 11K, 3 pictures)

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Dave Vinograd

Installing the GE-645 in Paris

The story of how the Paris Multics system was installed, by Dave Vinograd. (07/21/98, 10K, 1 picture)

Teaching Multics in Tokyo

Vignettes of Dave's trip to teach Multics in Japan. (07/21/98, 11K, 1 picture)

The Developer's Wail

Debugging dynamic reconfiguration. (07/21/98, 6K)

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Bernie Greenberg

Multo Ante Natus Eram

Multics sites worldwide celebrated Bernie Greenberg's 45th birthday in an unusual way. (10/25/95, 10K)

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Gérard Dugast

Here are some photographs taken by Gérard Dugast of the machine room at INRIA, Rocquencourt, France, in October 1991. Gérard says: "Multics was stopped in Aug/Sep 1991, a few months before the destruction of the machine, on 7 Feb 1992."

INRIA Machine Room #1

Picture of the INRIA machine room, disk drives, laser printer, MPCs. (10/13/95, 35K)

INRIA Machine Room #2

Picture of the INRIA machine room. (10/13/95, 34K)

INRIA Machine Room #3

Picture of the INRIA machine room, line printer, tape drives. (10/13/95, 40K)

INRIA Machine Room #4

Picture of some machine guts. (10/13/95, 59K)

INRIA Machine Room #5

Picture of some machine guts and a control panel. (10/13/95, 61K)

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Jerry Grochow

Multics Operational Statistics, 1969

Stats from the earliest use of Multics as a service, provided by Jerry Grochow. (06/13/95, 7K, 2 pictures)