> From: Ben Franchuk > Multics never really made it out of the lab.
This 'bogo-meme' (to use a word I coined) is, well, totally flat wrong. Multics was a reasonably successful product for Honeywell from the end of 1972 (when the H6180 was introduced) to around 1987 (when they stopped selling the DPS8/M, which had been introduced at the end of 1982). At its peak, in 1985, there were almost 100 Multics sites. MIT ceased to be involved in Multics development in 1977. Multics died not because it was a failure (indeed, many systems kept running for years, because the users liked it so much - the last one only shut down in 2000), but because of Honeywell's incompetence at the computer business. (That incompetence eventually resulted in a decision - probably correct from the _business_ point of view, given said incompetence - to get out of the computer business.) More here: http://multicians.org/myths.html and http://multicians.org/hill-mgt.html (which discusses the high-level corporate politics behind the decision to can Multics). Noel