Talk:Multics

Conditions

I have this idea was the first OS to make extensive use of conditions inside the OS (something that even today I suspect not many do). This needs to be verified, and can then be added. Jnc (talk) 15:21, 6 October 2017 (CEST)

Multics BCPL

Interesting; the Multics BCPL note spells Multics as "MULTICS". ISTR that either Jerry (possibly) or Corby (likely) insisted that it was not a acronym, and thus was not all upper-case. And most original documentation does spell it that way.

(Sorry I get so wound up about case, etc; I've always been that way a bit, and then the AP decided that 'Internet' should be spelled 'internet', ignoring the fact that 'internet' was an existing (older) word with a slightly different meaning. I've never recovered.) Jnc (talk) 20:22, 11 June 2023 (CEST)

Agreed, that one in particular stands out. Otherwise Multics is rather consistently capitalized. With regards to your passion: go for it, run with the wind! Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 07:04, 12 June 2023 (CEST)

Another agreement.. as for MULTICS/Multics, with no personal historical knowledge about the OS, I do remember that in that time period it was common to use all uppercase for a lot of names in computing, in real life as well as in fiction. Didn't matter if the name was an acronym or not. The ones I'm personally familiar with are all the "NORD" computers - that's "NORTH" in Norwegian and wasn't an acronym. Tor (talk) 07:38, 12 June 2023 (CEST)

I think the uppercase was in part because there were a lot of 'word' acronyms in that period, many of which I suspect were played with to make them pronounceable words: ENIAC, MANIAC, JOSS, ACE, EDSAC, SWAC, SEAC - unlike the ones which were just plain acronyms: CTSS, BCPL, NLS. And then there were names that were spelled in uppercase although they more naturally should have been CamelCase: ForTran, UniVac - although CamelCase hadn't been invented yet, I think in part because I/O devices that could do lowercase were uncommon - the common Teletype was uppercase-only. All of which created an environment in which computer-related names were 'naturally' uppercase. (Multics was the first OS that used lowercase a lot - for filenames, etc - I think. ITS didn't.)

Corby and the Multicians were sticklers (like me :-), and said 'it's a word, not an acronym, so no all-uppercase'! Jnc (talk) 16:24, 12 June 2023 (CEST)