The Gloriously Impossible Effort to Lovelace MULTICS

a cause · back to all causes

MULTICS is one of the most important systems ever built, and most of what it taught the world was taught by being read rather than by being run. It is still readable. It still runs, on an emulated dps8m. And the methods for proving a program correct have moved on by about fifty years since it was written.

So: take a piece of MULTICS, rebuild it in proved Ada, and then do the thing that actually finds bugs — run the old program next to the new one on the real system and watch where they disagree. Not tests against our own expectations. The original, answering for itself. That method is written up here, from the time it found a bug in a banking program that had been running for decades.

Nobody gets promised a completed MULTICS proof. Every Lovelaced component is another experiment. We don't know how far we'll get. That's rather the point.

It is open-ended computational archaeology. The value is in each component that comes out the far side with a proof attached and a disagreement log against the original — and in what we learn where the two of them differ. If the whole thing stalls at four modules, four modules of MULTICS have been proved and that is four more than existed before.

Have a say

When the factory's credits go live, you will be able to donate them toward this. For now, your vote is the steering.

Whatever the factory forges for a cause is released as AGPL free software: the commons gets the code, and no cause here produces a proprietary product.

How the vote works

One vote per visitor, as far as an honest server can tell without cookies — we rate-limit and hash addresses, we do not store them. The hash is salted, it is what stops a second vote in the same week, and it is thrown away when the week turns. Your address itself is never written to disk.

That is not one person one vote and we are not going to pretend it is. Two people on the same home connection share a hash, and one person on two networks has two. It is a steer, honestly counted, and it is the best a site can do without following you about.

No scripts, no cookies, no analytics here either — a vote is an ordinary form, posted to this server and counted on it. View source and check.