Oral-History talk:John Pierce (Part 2)

Footnote about a factual error in his memory

I don't know what the protocol is for adding footnotes to oral history pages, so I will note this here, so at least a note is made about it somewhere.

He says "a huge timesharing system which was then called MULTICS. That was never fully completed.". This is a very common mistaken impression that people have - in his case, perhaps because it was incomplete at the time that Bell pulled out of the project in April, 1969. Multics (the correct spelling - 'Corby', the project head at MIT, was very particular about that - it was not an acronym) was eventually completed, eventually becoming the main interactive computing resource at MIT in October 1969. (They continued to have a Multics system in this role for almost 20 years thereafter.)

Multics became a major product for Honeywell (to whom GE sold their computer business in 1970), sold many systems, and only died in 1987 as a result of Honeywell corporate internal politics (hardware production was stopped, along with software development and maintenance). "Multics continued to be used by customers for an additional 14 years" (source below); the last one was only shut down in 2000.

See Myth: Multics failed in 1969 at multicians.org for more. Jnc (talk) 11:46, 14 June 2025 (UTC)