Quotes About Multics

I had spent the summer of 1966 working at MIT in the group that was the MIT component of the Multics effort.

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.

By mid-1970, they had a preliminary version up and running. Somewhere along the way, moreover, their homebrew operating system had acquired a name. According to one version of the story, the name signified "one of whatever Multics was many of." According to another, it stood for "Multics without balls." But either way it came out the same: Unix.