Multics

Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extraordinarily influential early time-sharing operating system.

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Initial planning and development for Multics started in 1964. Originally it was a cooperative project led by MIT (with Fernando Corbat?), along with General Electric and Bell Labs. Bell Labs dropped out in 1969, and in 1970 GE's computer business, including Multics, was taken over by Honeywell.

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Multics was conceived as a commercial product for GE, and it did achieve that for Honeywell, although it was not a very successful one. However, it had a powerful impact in the computer field, due to its many novel and valuable ideas. Although it was much derided at the time by its critics http://www.multicians.org/myths.html, history has shown these complaints to be canards.

Time-sharing: Time-sharing is an approach to interactive computing in which a single computer is used to provide apparently simultaneous interactive general-purpose computing to multiple users by sharing processor time....

Operating system: In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. Additionally, it provides a foundation upon which to run application software such as word processing programs and web browsers....

1964: :For the Nintendo 64 emulator, see 1964 (Emulator)....