I remember Multics fondly.  If I remember right, BellLabs sold its interest 
in Project MAC at MIT to General Electric.  Multics was the big secure 
timeshare system being developed at the time at MIT.  General Electric sold 
off its computer stuff to Honeywell and the management structure.  Multics 
was originally build as a GCOS machine with extra hardware attached (for 
virtual memory, ring support (security), single level store, 
etc).  Management and sales had a hard time with Multics.  It was an extra 
cost item and they really tried pushing GCOS unless the customer demanded 
Multics.  While I was there I knew a group that started a complete redesign 
of Multics into CMOS and would be a stand alone computer (that is, not an 
add on to GCOS hardware).  The project was ahead of schedule and under 
budget but still the GCOS and Level 6 teams managed to get the project 
canned.  Sigh.  It was a great system and 95% of the source code (written 
in PL/1) was on line and available to programmers.  The assembly language 
manual was restricted but the PL/1 compiler was very good. I first learned 
Emacs when Bernie Greenberg wrote the first version of Emacs in Lisp for 
Multics.  Then when on to Lisp, Smalltalk, and Java.

At 03:19 PM 8/9/2001 -0800, you wrote:
>Yes, two plays on words:
>
>   * UNIX was originally a single user system
>
>   * It was the answer to the question: "What do you get when you castrate 
> a Multics?"
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan
>
>------
>
>At 1:23 PM -0400 8/9/01, Rosemary Michelle Simpson wrote:
>>On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Jeff Szuhay wrote:
>>
>>>  Hmm... perhas the confusion lies with the likes
>>>  of Apple and their QuickDraw, QuickTime, AppleScript,
>>>  MacApp, FireWire, OpenDoc, ad nauseum; UNIX (which doesn't
>>>  stand for anything); GNU, Gnu, and other variants; and even better NeXT.
>>
>>Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that UNIX was a play upon
>>words as a descendant (of sorts) of Multics.
>>
>>R.
>
>
>--
>
>