MULTICS Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

MULTICS - Assignment Example Multics wasn’t very loved in its time, but due to all the new and valuable ideas, it had a big impact on the future operating systems. Multics was marketed as an information service for thousands of academics and administrative users. At one point about 85 sites were ran by Multics (â€Å"Multics," n.d.). Multics Influences on the Future One of Multics remarkable features was that the OS was written in a high-level language (PL/I). The idea was also that it was supposed to be an open-source system, which meant "for any purpose and without fee" (â€Å"Multics: General Info,† n.d.). Other features were the dynamic linking, management of shared memory, its multiple language support (like BASIC, COBOL and Pascal) and the fact that the security-level was very high (â€Å"Multics: General Info,† n.d.). Several basic ideas from Multics are found in all modern OS, like Windows, Unix or Mac. One of those ideas is the hierarchical file system: directories can contain file s as well as (sub)directories. Multics was also a very big influence on the development of Unix, none the less due to the fact that the two ‘inventors’ of Unix, used to work on Multics until Bell Labs dropped out of the project. Several ideas of Multics were further developed for Unix.