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
development. The Ford systems group had a fair knowledge of operating
systems, having originally supported the Ford Philco 212 OS, and
welcomed the chance to contribute to this interesting new system
called Multics. To this day the following software products are
licensed from Bull at no charge to Ford because of the joint
development effort on MR3:
Alas, Multics fell victim to economic and experimental woes. Because
it 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.
It came back in sunnier economic times several years later. In 1978
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
was available and Multics was a more robust product. The next year
Multics was moved by upgrading from Level 68s to 8/70Ms into its new
home in the Engineering Computer Center. It grew into three systems,
with capacity and usage peaking around 1989. The last major upgrade
was to convert from 501 to 3381 model disks, convert IOMs to IMUs, and
upgrade to MR12.1 in 1988.
Most of the Multics applications were migrated to Sequent systems, and
in 1995 only one Multics system (two applications) remains.
