I used to support a few of these over IOLAN 9600 baud serial networks at one company :D

http://www.old-computers.com/history/images/LearSiegler_ADM3A_Advert_2.jpg
http://www.old-computers.com/history/detail.asp?n=32&t=3

The rest of the terminals were Wyse WY-30 amber ASCII models.

IIRC, the "multi-organizational effort in the early 1960s" was the Multics project. It wasn't the only large O/S project to have problems in the 1960s. IBM's MVS project also ran into serious problems but was eventually completed. Much of what we now know about developing large software projects comes from studies of those projects.

Yep, Multics and those other great 1960s OSes were vying for their place. :)

General Electric & Honeywell were working on GCOS (God's Chosen Operating System), but that eventually got folded into UNIX by Honeywell-Bull. HP developed MPE, which they've tried to wean people off of for 3 decades so that they could finally stop building their 3000-series hardware, and of course VMS and OpenVMS were completed by DEC too.

When all shook out over the decades, it seems that UNIX (and the UNIX-like Linux and BSD derivatives) was the only one of them left standing until Dave Cutler ran off from DEC to Microsoft with the Mica project that became Windows NT, and which DEC eventually proved was stolen and got about $150 million from Microsoft.

Oh yes the great old days of ...

DecSystem10 ... used that in school, great OS
Honeywell GCOS .... worked for Honeywell mostly on GCOS, some Multics

Any one heard of the Multics cookie monster at Bell?

Were you the one who screwed up my start_up, BHoward?!!!!! :D

IIRC, The first Unix system I used was a PDP-8 with BSD. The person who managed that system is now head of IS at UWO. Not bad for a Unix geek. :D

No ... only my boss's ... was none too happy when I laughed at him :o

On the DPS6 Mini, got pass security, installed a new keyboard handler to add 1 to every character and display to the screen. Also emulated the break functions so he could not get out of it.

Soooo, when he types A and get B :D

Looked right at me and "You did this ... didn't you"

I actually used to repair the DPS6 mini's along with the Dec Ultimates.:) Fondly remember the Phoenix and Sabre drives but I can't remember the name of those 300 Mg drives that used to be the size of dishwashers.

Too bad there isn't any hardware left to run it on and no emulators that I know of for PC, but anyways MIT has graciously opened the source code of Multics, the venerable "parent" OS of UNIX and inspiration for all modern computer OSes:

http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/

In honour of the occasion here's a little snippet of PL/I (language) code from back through the mists of time :DHELLO: PROCEDURE OPTIONS (MAIN);

/* A PROGRAM TO OUTPUT HELLO WORLD */
FLAG = 0;

LOOP: DO WHILE (FLAG = 0);
PUT SKIP DATA('HELLO WORLD!');
END LOOP;

END HELLO;I had a prof who hated UNIX because it was usurping his beloved Multics... eventually IBM came and ripped out all the Multics and replaced it with AIX on RS6000 or else they'd void service contracts and stuff like that - at least that's what was rumoured at the time.

Some of the environments I've worked on during my twenty year career:

- Zenith DOS on their Zilog 80 based microcomputers, programming in BASIC.
- IBM 4300 Series mini-computers, programming in 370 Assembler, COBOL and RPG II.
- HP 3000 Series mini-computers, programming in COBOL.
- From OS/2 1.0 to OS/2 Warp 4 on PCs, programming in C++ and REXX.
- Windows NT, 2000 and XP on PCs, programming in C++.

Now that I'm pursuing a career in the television industry, I don't know what to do with myself! Linux maybe? :D