This shows that the only remaining Bell Labs contributions in the source code are three small changes from Joseph F. Ossanna, and I suspect this was true even before I started working for Multics in the 1980s. I suspect most of their work was before the PL/I compiler was ready, and so was entirely rewritten.
Who contributed what to Multics when, based on source code history comments: https://lippard.org/Multics/span.html
Whoever did this isn't saying Republicans are pedos, but that Democrats who support Andy Biggs for Gov (AZ) are pedos.
Archive::Multics version 0.04 just released, fixes security issue with crafted archives that was likely mitigated by use of unveil on OpenBSD.
Various tools for supporting Multics on OpenBSD, Multics features on Unix, Unix features on Multics: https://github.com/lippard661/multics
Multics archive support for Unix/Linux/macOS: https://github.com/lippard661/Archive-Multics
Found the PL-6 source for the game engine and the database munger, and it has a lot of CP-6 dependencies, unfortunately. Might be possible to do a PL/I rewrite, but would require reinventing some of the architecture using Multics features. It would be a much more substantial project.
Dave Platt has granted permission for the Multics port to be part of the upcoming Multics MR12.9 release (and also said he considers it open source, though he considered the PL6 reimplementation to be much better than the original Fortran IV-derived one).
I've published ports of Dave Platt's 550-point Adventure (the best one, IMO) for OpenBSD and Multics: https://github.com/lippard661/adv550
The text is output from a game I wrote as a high school freshman in 1979-80 called "explore." It was written in Multics Basic for the Multics operating system. The paper in the photo was dug out of my closet on September 4, and consisted of version 5.3 of the basic code, the text of a complete play-through of version 4.3, the contents of the past winners database, and the text of an aspirational version 6.0 of the game database.
"? s
You are in a large room, filled with ceiling-high rows of shelves,
each shelf lined with dprints. Passages lead north and south.
A computer printout of Explore is here!
? get
Okay."
Old review, turned into blog post: Book Review: Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise. http://blog.lippard.org/2026/08/book-review-tom-nichols-death-of-expertise.html/
A remembrance of my friend Steve, from an underground high school newspaper to the Phoenix punk scene to protesting Scientology. https://blog.lippard.org/2026/07/remembering-steve.html/
Today's blog post is about reportnew, a tool for monitoring logs that includes support for process accounting logs on *BSD, Linux, and macOS, Linux journals, and cyclog/multilog logs. https://blog.lippard.org/2026/06/25-years-of-openbsd-security-tools-reportnew.html/
Today's blog post is about rsync-tools, for use with a nonprivileged account to secure various rsync use cases. https://blog.lippard.org/2026/06/25-years-of-openbsd-security-tools-rsync-tools.html/
Updated blog post link: https://blog.lippard.org/2026/06/25-years-of-openbsd-security-tools-syslock.html/
To go straight to the code and documentation: https://github.com/lippard661/syslock
Today's blog post is all about managing immutable and append-only files on *BSD (including macOS) and Linux with syslock. https://lippard.blogspot.com/2026/06/25-years-of-openbsd-security-tools_01207190222.html
If you just want to go straight to the tools, there is decent documentation with them on Github: https://github.com/lippard661/
Posts will be on Tuesdays and Fridays.