This is far from a comprehensive history of the Ford site, but I
thought I'd mention that Ford had Multics twice. In 1973-1975 Multics
arrived on a trial basis that included a certain amount of joint OS
called Multics. To this day the following software products are
licensed from Bull at no charge to Ford because of the joint
AGS6802 ISTAT
SGC6800 Multics Comm System
SGC6803 Bisync support, MCS
SGC6804 G115 support, MCS
SGE6800 Multics Software Extensions
SGE6802 RJE facility
SGL6801 Fortran-77
SGL6802 Basic
SGS6800 Multics Exec
SGS6801 GCOS TSS Environment
Alas, Multics fell victim to economic and experimental woes. Because
t was an experimental/evaluation system users were reluctant to write
applications for it. Because there were no applications for it, when
the economy dipped and money got tight there was no justification for
keeping it.
applications were written on System-M, then moved to Ford's own
Multics system when it arrived later that year. By this time MR6.5
Multics was moved by upgrading from Level 68s to 8/70Ms into its new
upgrade to MR12.1 in 1988.
Most of the Multics applications were migrated to Sequent systems, and
n 1995 only one Multics system (two applications) remains.
-Bruce Sanderson
Ford Motor Co
