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Introduction

This article describes MIT's Project MAC, the organization that led the initial creation of Multics. This is not a comprehensive history of Project MAC: my goal is to provide context and motivation for Multics history, and to provide accurate statements and references for deeper investigation. (The author was a part-time undergraduate programmer and then a research staff member at Project MAC during its first seven years.)

Background

MIT environment

MIT's first digital computer, Whirlwind, was built at MIT after World War II, for the US Navy and Air Force. The MIT Libraries has a collection of historical material about the computer. Whirlwind began as a project for the US Navy to create a digital flight simulator for bomber crews. It was then adapted for realtime use, processing air defense radar for the US Air Force. Computer core memory was first developed for Whirlwind by Jay Forrester.

MIT had a tradition of cooperation with the US government. Members of the MIT faculty and administration served on government commissions and boards, and MIT professors, staff, and students did government research, in peacetime as well as wartime.

Joseph C. R. Licklider, who had created a psychology group in the MIT Electrical Engineering department, was involved in the beginning of MIT Lincoln Labs, which undertook US Air Force projects on air defense in the 1950s. Licklider's group found that analog computing was not adequate for brain modeling, and became interested in digital computing. Licklider left MIT in 1957 to join the research firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he fell in love with computers. He learned to program a Digital Equipment PDP-1 and used it in his research and other activities. This led to his writing his history-making paper 'Man-Computer Symbiosis' in March 1960 [lick-sym]

MIT users of Whirlwind became a community of researchers interested in computers. Whirlwind was supported by the US government, but not classified; MIT's Lincoln Laboratory carried out classified projects using it. The TX-0 computer was a conversion of the Whirlwind design from vacuum tubes to transistors, begun in 1955 at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. TX-0 was 'loaned' to the MIT EE department in 1958, and housed in MIT Building 20. The machine continued to be modified. It provided direct conversational access to the computer for researchers and students. [jbd-inter]

In the 1950s and early 1960s, it wasn't clear where computers fit into existing academic courses. Many academics didn't believe that 'computer science' should be viewed as a discipline, any more than 'slide rule science.' The computer was seen as a tool, rather than an interesting subject in itself. John McCarthy and Fernando Corbató were young MIT professors of Electrical Engineering who became interested in computers in the 1950s. Robert M. Fano, a full professor of Electrical Engineering, had made major contributions to information theory, and wrote the standard text on electromagnetic theory. [fca] While looking for new research to pursue, Fano attended a course in computing given by Corby and McCarthy about 1960.

MIT Computation Center

In 1950, Provost Julius Stratton formed the Committee on Machine Methods of Computation to study the introduction of computers for general use by faculty and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
-- John Krige [krige]

Prof. P. M. Morse, bldg 26

Prof. Philip M. Morse was the chairman of the committee. The committee recommended construction of a Computation Center for MIT. The design of MIT's new building for electrical engineering, the Karl Taylor Compton Laboratories (building 26), was modified to add the first floor computer room. Construction of the building, partly supported by funds from IBM, began in 1955 and was completed in 1957. Prof. Morse became director of the MIT Computation Center in 1957: it operated an IBM 704. IBM owned and maintained the computer hardware. The use of the machine was donated: one shift was for MIT, one shift was for the 40-some-odd New England Colleges and Universities, and one shift was retained for IBM to use. The unspecified fourth shift (i.e. weekends), and any unused time on other shifts, was used by MIT. [fjc-mail] The 704 was replaced by an IBM 709 in 1960. In 1962, the 709 was moved to MIT Building 10, and an IBM 7090 was installed in the Building 26 computer room. That computer was updated to an IBM 7094 in 1964. An IBM 360/65 was installed in 1966. The TX-0 was moved to the second floor of Building 26 by 1961, and a DEC PDP-1 was added in the adjoining office.

Computers in the Early 60s

Computers were very expensive and scarce at the end of the 1950s. Transistors were replacing vacuum tubes for logic; core memory replaced delay lines and drum storage for program data. Computer systems were built from discrete components soldered to circuit boards, which were often interconnected by wire-wrapped backplanes. The high cost of computers meant that organizations needed to use them as efficiently as possible, with a minimum of unproductive idle time.

Operating systems began as an attempt to use computer resources efficiently. An OS that kept the computer busy saved money. Operating systems also provided services so programmers didn't have to re-invent their own, e.g. tape error recovery, reducing the cost of programming and the time to implement new software.

Time-Sharing

At the beginning of the 60s, computing at MIT was done interactively on computers dedicated to a single user at a time (Whirlwind, TX-0, PDP-1), or by using batch processing on mainframes (704, 709, 7090, 7094). Time-sharing a single computer among multiple users was proposed as a way to provide interactive computing to more than one person at a time, in order to support more people and to reduce the amount of time programmers had to wait for results. MIT Prof. John McCarthy was one of the first to propose the idea; he wrote a memo to Philip Morse in 1959 proposing time-sharing for MIT's 709. [jmc-memo]

Several teams based in the Boston area began experimenting with time-sharing systems. McCarthy proposed modifications to MIT's IBM 704 that would operate it in 'time stealing' mode and interrupt the batch processing stream with interactive jobs. This facility was demonstrated in 1960. [jmc-rem] MIT Prof. Fernando Corbató, the assistant director of the MIT Computation Center, led a small group of programmers in a project that demonstrated time-sharing on MIT's IBM 709 computer. This system was known as the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), since the time-sharing environment and the batch processing environment shared the system resources, and programs written for batch could be run under time-sharing. This system was demonstrated in November 1961 serving four interactive users and swapping to tape. [ctss] At BBN, McCarthy, Licklider, and Ed Fredkin created a time-sharing system that ran on a modified Digital PDP-1 computer. This system was finished in September 1962. The MIT Electrical Engineering department also obtained a PDP-1 computer from Digital, and Prof. Jack Dennis and his students built a time-sharing system for it and demonstrated it in 1962.

The MIT administration created a Long Range Computation Study Group, which produced a report dated April, 1961. The leaders of this study group were professors Albert Hill, Robert Fano, and Philip Morse. The study group created a technical subcommittee that included professors Corbató, McCarthy, Minsky, Dennis, and Ross; Prof. Herbert Teager was the chair. They vis

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