What is MULTICS?
MULTICS
The MULTICS operating system (Corbato and Vyssotsky [1965], Organick [1972]) was designed at MIT as a natural extension of CTSS. CTSS and other early time-sharing systems were so successful that they created an immediate desire to proceed quickly to bigger and better systems. As larger computers became available, the designers of CTSS set out to create a time-sharing utility. Computing service would be provided like electrical power. Large computer systems would be connected by telephone wires to terminals in offices and homes throughout a city. The operating system would be a time-shared system running continuously with a vast file system of shared programs and data.
MULTICS was designed by a team from MIT, GE (which later sold its computer department to Honeywell), and Bell Laboratories (which dropped out of the project in 1969). The basic GE 635 computer was modified to a new computer system called the GE 645, mainly by the addition of pagedsegmentation memory hardware.
A virtual address was composed of an 18-bit segment number and a 16-bit word offset. The segments were then paged in 1-KB-word pages. The second-chance page-replacement algorithm was used.
The segmented virtual address space was merged into the file system; each segment was a file. Segments were addressed by the name of the file. The file system itself was a multilevel tree structure, allowing users to create their own subdirectory structures.
Like CTSS, MULTICS used a multilevel feedback queue for CPU scheduling. Protection was accomplished through an access list associated with each file and a set of protection rings for executing processes. The system, which was written almost entirely in PL/1, comprised about 300,000 lines of code. It was extended to a multiprocessor system, allowing a CPU to be taken out of service for maintenance while the system continued running.
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