[ih] Where's Multics now, was Internet-history Digest

[Clem Cole]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 11:02 AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On 8/17/2025 10:56 AM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> > Huh?  Windows NT was widely reported to be the seconf coming of VMS
> > and that's what's still inside Windows 11.
>
> Exactly.
>
> I forgot to connect the dots:  Multics -> VMS -> Windows.
>
Ouch... VMS's parent was RSX, and that's parent was a real-time system Dave
wrote for the PDP-10 when he was at Dupont before DEC hired him.   To
my knowledge, Dave had not read Organick's book when he did those systems
(I'm not sure he has even today).   He was purely a real-time guy/process
control guy - not a multi-user/mult-tasking.

FWIW:  Dave's MICA uKernel, which he took with him to Microsoft to become
the basis for NT OS/2 (which would later become NT after the Microsoft IBM
divorce)  >>was<< influenced by CMU's Mach, and Dave openly tells that
story in many places.  [FYI, I wrote the spec for the parallel system stuff
/locking structure, etc, for all that when I was consulting for NCR — as
NCR was part of the NT/OS 2 team, which a lot of people knew about [ I may
still have some of those papers kicking around, but I'm not sure].  NCR was
developing 4 and 16 processor NT OS/2 boxes - Lee Hovel was the HW lead.

Anyway, since the threads on this list are supposed to be about Internet
History, I think that this discussion belongs over on the COFF mailing
list, since it's really about old *OS history*, not Internet history.

Clem