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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 18-Aug-25 08:10, Clem Cole via Internet-history wrote:
> 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, 

Which RSX? iirc there was RSX-11A through RSX-11D and they were all
rather different. (And according to Wikipedia, they were preceded by
RSX-15 and succeeded by RSX-11M and RSX-11S, and Dave Cutler joined
the effort at the RSX-11M stage.)

I remember in 1973/74 trying to get RSX-11D running on a PDP-11/45
and hitting unfixable problems, not to mention concertina-folded paper
tapes all over the floor.

    Brian

> 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