12 Nov
2007
12 Nov
'07
2:52 a.m.
Hi,
I don't know if anyone else noticed but MIT has released the source (and
documentation) to MULTICS. The link is:
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/
I haven't gone through it (yet) but thought I should bring this great
news to everyone's attention.
--
TTFN - Guy
12 Nov
12 Nov
3:14 a.m.
Guy Sotomayor wrote:
Hi,
I don't know if anyone else noticed but MIT has released the source (and
documentation) to MULTICS. The link is:
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/
I haven't gone through it (yet) but thought I should bring this great
news to everyone's attention.
But what machines could run the that today?
3:17 a.m.
woodelf wrote:
Guy Sotomayor wrote:
PS. Takes a look at the web
link.
Funny how NOW MIT releases source,but they never saved a
a copy of the source code.
Hi,
I don't know if anyone else noticed but MIT has released the source
(and documentation) to MULTICS. The link is:
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/
I haven't gone through it (yet) but thought I should bring this great
news to everyone's attention.
But what machines could run the that today? 
3:48 a.m.
At 1:14 AM -0700 11/12/07, woodelf wrote:
Guy Sotomayor wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I don't know if anyone else noticed but MIT has released the source
>(and documentation) to MULTICS. The link is:
>http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/
>
>I haven't gone through it (yet) but thought I should bring this
>great news to everyone's attention.
Thanks for that info, I'm quite interested, and was unaware of this.
But what machines could run the that today?
Either the GE-645 or Honeywell 6180 (DPS-8 family), hopefully someone
will look into writing an emulator now. I'd love to see GCOS-8 of
the same vintage as the MULTICS release available in some form (it
also ran on a DPS-8).
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
4:17 p.m.
On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 01:14 -0700, woodelf wrote:
Guy Sotomayor wrote:
Anything you port it to.
Seriously, I bet *someone* out there will have a crack at it. It can't
be that hard, can it?
Gordon
Hi,
I don't know if anyone else noticed but MIT has released the source (and
documentation) to MULTICS. The link is:
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/
I haven't gone through it (yet) but thought I should bring this great
news to everyone's attention.
But what machines could run the that today? 
4:26 p.m.
Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
That's an interesting question. I can't think of that many machines
with a hardware ring architecture, and it's not something that can be
easily faked with more traditional architectures. It would be a fairly
invasive "port".
Does anyone know offhand how many rings Multics needed?
--
Chris Kennedy
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP
http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."
But what
machines could run the that today?
Anything you port it to.
Seriously, I bet *someone* out there will have a crack at it. It can't
be that hard, can it?
4:31 p.m.
On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 13:26 -0800, Chris Kennedy wrote:
Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
That's an interesting question. I can't think of that many machines
with a hardware ring architecture, and it's not something that can be
easily faked with more traditional architectures. It would be a fairly
invasive "port".
It pains me to say it, but you could just throw CPU horsepower and
memory at the problem.
Gordon
But what
machines could run the that today?
Anything you port it to.
Seriously, I bet *someone* out there will have a crack at it. It can't
be that hard, can it? 
4:41 p.m.
That's an interesting question. I can't think
of that many machines
with a hardware ring architecture, and it's not something that can be
easily faked with more traditional architectures. It would be a fairly
invasive "port".
Probably the simplest thing would be to make a CPU emulator, and run it in
that. Then you can be totally architecturally agnostic.
Performance, of course, would suck.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- I may have invented CtrlAltDel, but Microsoft made it popular. -- D. Bradley
5:12 p.m.
At 1:41 PM -0800 11/12/07, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Why on earth would performance suck? The original hardware was dog
slow, by todays standards. Shoot the DPS-8's I worked on in the
early 90's they were dog slow, their main advantage was I/O. The I/O
on a full blown system is where a modern system might have emulation
problems, still, who is going to want to emulate rows of disks and
tape drives. The various PDP-10 emulators have shown that you can
get decent performance out of a 32-bit CPU running a 36-bit emulator.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
That's an
interesting question. I can't think of that many machines
with a hardware ring architecture, and it's not something that can be
easily faked with more traditional architectures. It would be a fairly
invasive "port".
Probably the simplest thing would be to make a CPU emulator, and run it in
that. Then you can be totally architecturally agnostic.
Performance, of course, would suck.
5:29 p.m.
Probably the
simplest thing would be to make a CPU emulator, and run it in
that. Then you can be totally architecturally agnostic.
Performance, of course, would suck.
Why on earth would performance suck? The original hardware was dog
slow, by todays standards.
6:33 p.m.
New subject: 6502 VS 6502
> Well, that's what I mean. For 'suck'
it would require considerably more
> cycles per emulated instruction. On today's hardware it would scream,
> but remember that you're talking to someone who emulates a 6502 on a 6502 :)
Why?
http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/kim-1/emu.html
Eventually I'll work on another version of this and add some new stuff.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Flat text is just *never* what you want. -- stephen p spackman -------------
6:41 p.m.
New subject: 6502 VS 6502
Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Neat!
> Well,
that's what I mean. For 'suck' it would require considerably more
> cycles per emulated instruction. On today's hardware it would scream,
> but remember that you're talking to someone who emulates a 6502 on a 6502 :)
Why?
http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/kim-1/emu.html
Eventually I'll work on another version of this and add some new stuff. 
4:46 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Chris Kennedy once stated:
Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
That's an interesting question. I can't think of that many machines
with a hardware ring architecture,
I can think of several thousand that have been made over the past decade,
all made with the Intel x86 architecture. It even has the segments that
Multics used. Seems like a perfect match to me.
-spc (Maybe Multics was just a bit early?)
But what
machines could run the that today?
Anything you port it to.
Seriously, I bet *someone* out there will have a crack at it. It can't
be that hard, can it?
4:57 p.m.
Sean Conner wrote:
I can think of several thousand that have been made
over the past decade,
all made with the Intel x86 architecture. It even has the segments that
Multics used. Seems like a perfect match to me.
Hence my question regarding the number of rings used by Multics. Just
because there's multiple contexts doesn't mean that there's _enough_ of
them.
Anyone got an DG Eagle (MV) family machine lying around? It has eight
honest-to-goodness rings and hardware ring call support. Only 32 bits,
though...
--
Chris Kennedy
chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP
http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
"Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."
6:55 a.m.
In article <47380644.70701 at shiresoft.com>,
Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> writes:
I don't know if anyone else noticed but MIT has
released the source (and
documentation) to MULTICS. The link is:
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/
Very interesting! It looks like most of MULTICS was written in PL/1?
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
6:39 p.m.
On Nov 12, 2007, at 6:55 AM, Richard wrote:
Yep. I got the sources about two years ago and have dug through them
a fair bit, as I've done a little bit of PL/I. It'd be pretty
difficult to port it to a new architecture, but not impossible.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I don't
know if anyone else noticed but MIT has released the source
(and
documentation) to MULTICS. The link is:
http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/
Very interesting! It looks like most of MULTICS was written in PL/1?
7:02 p.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
The case of we have SOURCE but *No Compiler* :(
I forgot that was the time of kitchen-sink compilers - compile all sorts
of data types.
Very
interesting! It looks like most of MULTICS was written in PL/1?
Yep. I got the sources about two years ago and have dug through them
a fair bit, as I've done a little bit of PL/I. It'd be pretty difficult
to port it to a new architecture, but not impossible. -Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
7:07 p.m.
On Nov 12, 2007, at 7:02 PM, woodelf wrote:
The case of we have SOURCE but *No Compiler* :(
I forgot that was the time of kitchen-sink compilers - compile all
sorts
of data types.
I had a PL/I compiler for CP/M years ago. I have no idea what
happened to those disks. I can see writing a PL/I front-end for GCC.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Very interesting! It looks like most of MULTICS was
written in PL/1?
Yep. I got the sources about two years ago and have dug through
them a fair bit, as I've done a little bit of PL/I. It'd be pretty
difficult to port it to a new architecture, but not impossible. 
13 Nov
13 Nov
12:43 a.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
<snip>
I had a PL/I compiler for CP/M years ago. I have no idea what
happened to those disks. I can see writing a PL/I front-end for GCC.
<snip>
see
http://pl1gcc.sourceforge.net/
This package already parses multics pl1.
It does not address generating any code from the pl1 input at this time,
only the parsing problem.
As Al K already pointed out it will take more than this to get multics
running.
Jim
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20 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
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bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
chris＠mainecoon.com -
ggs＠shiresoft.com -
gordonjcp＠gjcp.net -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
jwstephens＠msm.umr.edu -
legalize＠xmission.com -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
spc＠conman.org -
spectre＠floodgap.com -
wdonzelli＠gmail.com