Any word on the Multics revival front?

Eric Swenson eric at swenson.org
Sat Mar 12 12:47:04 CST 2016


While I don't know of any GCOS 8 systems out there, Multics does include 
a GCOS batch simulator. Some customers of Multics used it (in preference 
to GCOS) because it was actually faster. While I can't vouch for the 
completeness or correctness of the GCOS batch system's working under the 
emulator, we know that at least some of it works, as the "map355" 
command needed to assemble the FNP image works under emulated Multics, 
and it uses the GCOS simulator to perform the assembly.

There is also a GCOS TSS subsystem under Multics, but we have reason to 
believe that it isn't working quite right yet. There must be some 
difficult-to-find emulator bug that is causing issues when running 
commands under TSS.

Feel free to check it out.  -- Eric

Message: 33 Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2016 20:51:28 -0800 From: Zane Healy 
<healyzh at aracnet.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic 
Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: Any word on the Multics 
revival front? Message-ID: 
<1D0736B9-F398-40BC-AA8E-8DAF80A62C88 at aracnet.com> Content-Type: 
text/plain; charset=utf-8

> On Mar 11, 2016, at 6:22 AM, Kevin Monceaux<Kevin at rawfeddogs.net>  wrote:
>
> OI hadn't checked on Multics progress in quite a while.  Yesterday I
> discovered that the DPS-8/M emulator at:
>
>     https://SourceForge.net/projects/dps8m/
>
> is far enough along to boot Multics.  I thought some folks on this list
> might be interested in it.

What I?d like to know is if any copies of GCOS-8 exist in the wild.  That?s what I?d personally really like to boot on the emulator.  I used to be able configure all the IOP?s, IOM?s, CPU?s, etc. from memory, power them up, and boot GCOS-8.

Zane




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