Creation of Multics

Multics, short for Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, was an influential time-sharing operating system developed from 1964 and 1965 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs and General Electric. It was meant to be a computer utility used by many people at once, and introduced ideas such as a hierarchical file system, dynamic linking and a security model with protection rings. The project was ambitious and over budget, and Bell Labs left it in 1969. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who had worked on it, built a simpler system on a small computer, which they called Unix, as a pun on Multics. The last Multics system was shut down in 2000.

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