Here’s a fabulous resource for anyone who’s interested in mini and micro computers (such as Multics, PDP-11s, VAXs and so on) – the site Bitsavers has a huge repository of documents (scanned as PDFs) as well as software for mini and microcomputers from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Did you know that you can get Fujitsu Cobol version 3 for absolutely nothing? (The latest versions are paid for, and the new one even targets .Net.)
COBOL was in demand for year 2000 compliance work; so much so there were rumours of recruitment agencies searching retirement homes, looking for retired COBOL programmers…
Anyway, if you’ve ever fancied trying the language considered the most verbose of all time (apparently there’s a disease called “COBOL fingers“, where you wear them down to stumps by typing long complicated mathematical statements in the form “ADD 1 TO SALES GIVING SALES” instead of, say “sales++”, or even “sales = sales + 1″) .
COBOL stands for “COmmon Business Oriented Language”, and the syntax was meant to be understandable by normal humans (that is, not programmers). However I suspect that it was also a reaction to the terseness of operating systems such as Multics, GEORGE III and Unix, all of which go in for shortened commands such as “ls”, “rm” and “chmod”.
Since then we’ve seen the advance of GUIs, much better development tools (ever tried writing a makefile by hand?) and a plethora of different programming languages.
Still, if you don’t fancy COBOL, how about Intercal? <evil grin>
The source code for Multics has been released now, “for any purpose and without fee”. The importance of this operating system can’t be underestimated; so many things we take for granted as standard features in modern operating systems were either invented for, or pioneered in, Multics: dynamic linking (DLLs, basically) and online reconfiguration (plug ‘n’ play, but more so: you could even add and remove CPUs while the system was running!) to name but two.
What really set Multics apart though was its security level, which was higher than any system at the time, and is still the only operating system to reach the B2 Orange Book security rating from the National Computer Security Centre (part of the NSA). It was also one of the first – if not the first – OSes to be written in a high level language. PL/I, to be precise (a language notorious for being really hairy).
The significance of the source release is this: Multics, which only ever ran on a specific set of mainframes, may yet come alive again. Possibly the most secure operating system of all time, and certainly one that was beloved by its operators (who call themselves Multicians), may be coming to a PC near you in the next couple of years, but this time as a free, open-source operating system. All it needs is someone to start the ball rolling and start a project on sourceforge… any takers?
