What is Multics?

Multics, the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, is the quintessential interactive time-sharing mainframe operating system. Multics began in 1965 as a pioneering research project, a joint effort of the best and brightest minds in academia, government, and industry.

Multics was the Project Apollo of operating system development.

Virtually every operating system from 1965 forward was heavily influenced by Multics. Nearly every feature associated with modern computing — the hierarchical file system, interprocess communication, single-level storage, dynamic linking, high-availability, online reconfiguration, ACL-based access control, multilevel isolation, and even the relational database — is a Multics innovation.

Multics was the sixth system to join the ARPANET — which would later become the Internet — in September of 1971.

Unlike most research projects, the Multics system graduated from academia, becoming an acclaimed commercial product of Honeywell (later Bull), and finding success in education, government, and industry.

Multics sites included MIT, the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Pentagon, NSA, the Canadian Department of National Defense, Bell Canada, Ford, General Motors, the University of Calgary, and Oakland University.

Although the Multics system software and the hardware on which it ran spanned multiple commercial generations and was used in critical production until the year 2000, the overall body of knowledge for Multics primarily consists of the papers, reports, and books written about the academic iterations of the system, as it existed from 1965 - 1972.

By providing the BAN.AI Public Access Multics service, we hope to challenge misconceptions and myths by providing access to an actively developed, maintained, and functional example of a Multics production system — not a mere historic artifact.