The “ Recent Changes” part of the site is depressing

Recent Changes 08/03 Multicians: Jim Bush died in July 2025.

07/14 Multicians: Norm Barnecut died Dec 09, 2023.

05/24 Multicians: Nate Adleman died Sept 19, 2022.

05/15 Simulator: Release 3.1.0 of the DPS8M simulator was released.

05/12 Multicians: Richard Gardner died in 2025.

05/05 Multicians: Art Bushkin died in Feb 2024.

Always fun to see Multics pop up; the influence it had on computing is pretty impressive and its influence lives on in many projects. As just one personally relevant example, the SCOMP mentioned in the glossary [0] and described in more detail on the history page under 5.4.1 [1] became the STOP operating system which is still in active development and is what I still work on today. (Technically, the SCOMP was the whole machine, and STOP "SCOMP Trusted Operating Program" was its operating system). Up until pretty recently, we still had a Multician working on STOP, and have a guy from the Honewell days still plugging away on it.

[0]https://www.multicians.org/mgs.html#SCOMP [1]https://www.multicians.org/history.html

My Operating Systems class as an undergrad used a book written by the Multics guys.

I hated it. It would present a bunch of apparently incompatible techniques for e.g. job scheduling, and then say that Multics implemented all of them. I immediately understood why UNIX came about: the Multics designers appeared incapable of having opinions, which led to an OS that was bloated and hard to understand.

That class was a long time ago, and I was a young, arrogant, and uninformed programmer, and maybe that take was wrong. But it left a strong impression at the time, and it was one of the few books from my undergrad days that I sold back instead of keeping.