Multics, Multics

Bell Labs dropped out in 1969 and in 1970 GE's computer business including Multics was taken over by Honeywell.

Due to its many novel and valuable ideas Multics had a great impact in the computer field even though it was then much derided by its critics.

This was due to the particular hardware architecture of the machines Multics ran on, which had a 36 bit word size (not using the 8-bit byte).

But the design philosophy was quite different, focusing on keeping the system small and simple, and so correcting the perceived deficiencies of Multics. The name Unix (originally Unics) is itself a hack on Multics.

The French university system had quite a few in the early 1980s. After Honeywell stopped supporting Multics, users migrated to other systems, including Unix.

The first MIT GE-645 had 512 kibiwords of memory (2 MiB), a truly enormous amount at the time, and the kernel only used a moderate portion of Multics main memory.

Source: Wikipedia > Multics