exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee) (05/01/91)
In article <3096@cirrusl.UUCP> Rahul Dhesi <dhesi@cirrus.COM> writes: >In <1991Apr30.142053.2313@sctc.com> stachour@sctc.com (Paul Stachour) writes: > >>Gee, with that kind of understandings, its no wonder that those of >>us who have used Multics are kind of upset when we are forced to migrate >>to systems where [non-Multics things happen]. > >So why are we all using UNIX and its derivatives? Why isn't Multics a >commercial success even though it seems to have a unique place in >history? Mostly because of internal politics at Honeywell. (Trust me, I worked there.) Centered around an internal power struggle (after HIS bought GE's large computer division) between the group that had been in Honeywell, and the group that had been bought in with the GE purchase. Honeywell finally took the machine off the market a couple of years ago because it wasn't selling. Not surprising that it wasn't selling, as they never really tried to sell it. HIS sales reps were, for example, given quotas of GCOS machines to sell, but no quotas for Multics sales. Some sales branches didn't even know about them. When University of Southwestern Louisiana decided they wanted to buy a Multics (because they used some MIT-developed courses) they called up their local HIS sales office and said they wanted a Multics. The sales rep they got replied along lines of 'Multics? Someone else must make that. This is HIS, we make GCOS machines.' USL actually had to put in a fair amount of work just to convince the salesman to check and see if HIS did have such a product. (In the end, they got one, but my friends there said it was clear the sales rep didn't like the idea, because it didn't count towards his sales quota.) When HIS stopped producing Multics, a number of companies expressed interest in acquiring the system source code so that they could take over production. (Building compatible hardware would have been fairly easy, as the requirements were well documented.) These included both a small (hypothetical) startup company mooted by a friend of mine (who had solid venture capital backing lined up), CDC I believe, and for sure (and ironically) HIS' French 'subsidiary', CII/Bull. For a while HIS looked like they might go for the idea, but then they backed down and stated that they would not release or sell rights to the source code. Most of the system bowels were developed under government contract and so were in the public domain, but most of the tools, compilers, utilities, ... were not. The would-be takeover groups felt (probably rightly) that they could not implement a profitable Multics replacement in reasonable time if they had to reimplement the entire user interface and support levels from scratch. This last bit explains why the concepts still show up everywhere, but the system itself does not. A lot of us feel that having to move from Multics to anything else represents a giant step backwards. Unix is just about OK. (There are, in fact, SOME things that Unix does better. There are a very large number where it falls short. My current annoyance is with the limitations on Unix access control, but that's another story.) (Followups directed to alt.folklore.computers.) -- Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!ukc!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132