The Multics System: An Examination of Its Structure

Organick describes the design of Multics, a mainframe timesharing system that was one of the most influential software efforts of the late 1960s. The book describes the internals of the Multics system with a clarity and thoroughness that set a standard for other writers on operating systems. The book describes Multics as it was planned in the late 1960s, before it had been released to users, and it describes the version of the system that ran on the GE-645 computer. Multics became a commercial product from Honeywell on a substantially enhanced machine and continued to evolve for 20 years, so readers should understand that they are reading about the system designers' intentions and plans, and not necessarily about features of the commercial system. (disclosure: I worked on Multics in the 60s and helped review drafts of some chapters of this book before publication.)