I think it was Dennis Ritchie who said, "If we had known about
Multics, we wouldn't have created UNIX".
Multics was one of the first multi-user multi-tasking operating
systems to be used on minicomputers such as the PDP series computers.
When AT&T donated UNIX V6 to about a hundred universities and colleges
and universities, some of the first enhancements were attempts to
emulate features that were available on Multics, most of these
features were introduced in the BSD versions of Unix.
Multics was not open source, so the college students at the
Universities had to figure out how to create these features knowing
nothing other than the description of how the feature worked on
Multics. It might be interesting to see how different the
implementations were.
