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

[John Day]

Our solution was to never use DEC code on an PDP-11. ;-)

Avoided a lot of headaches.

> On Aug 17, 2025, at 16:28, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
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