Details about IBM's early 'scientific' computers

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Ben Franchuk

    > Multics never really made it out of the lab.

This 'bogo-meme' (to use a word I coined) is, well, totally flat wrong.

Multics was a reasonably successful product for Honeywell from the end of
1972 (when the H6180 was introduced) to around 1987 (when they stopped
selling the DPS8/M, which had been introduced at the end of 1982). At its
peak, in 1985, there were almost 100 Multics sites.

MIT ceased to be involved in Multics development in 1977.

Multics died not because it was a failure (indeed, many systems kept running
for years, because the users liked it so much - the last one only shut down
in 2000), but because of Honeywell's incompetence at the computer business.
(That incompetence eventually resulted in a decision - probably correct from
the _business_ point of view, given said incompetence - to get out of the
computer business.)

More here:

  http://multicians.org/myths.html

and

  http://multicians.org/hill-mgt.html

(which discusses the high-level corporate politics behind the decision to
can Multics).

	Noel