On October 30, 2000, the last running Multics system was shut down, closing out a 31-year run for one of the most influential operating systems most people have never heard of. The final machine, operated by the Canadian Department of National Defence in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had been running the Navy’s operational command and control system. When it powered off that day, it marked the end of Multics as a living, in-production system.
Multics (short for “Multiplexed Information and Computing Service”) began in 1965 as a joint project between MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, aiming to build a “computer utility” that many users could share at once. It introduced ideas that are now taken for granted: segmented virtual memory, hierarchical file systems, ring-based security protections, and an operating system written largely in a high-level language (PL/I) instead of raw assembly. It was ambitious, slow to ship, and ultimately a commercial also-ran — but its ideas didn’t die with it. When Bell Labs pulled out of the project in 1969, several of its researchers, including Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, took lessons learned from Multics and built something leaner: Unix, whose descendants (Linux, macOS, BSD, and more) run much of the computing world today.
So in a roundabout way, the operating system that few people used directly ended up shaping nearly every operating system that followed. October 30, 2000 wasn’t the end of Multics’s influence — just the end of its uptime.
Source: Computer History Museum, Multicians.org
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