Some people may think that we started out in Basic and then simply leapt into DOS after 50 years without changes. However, this could not be any further from the truth if it involved a white rabbit with a pocket watch. Well, maybe if it went totally over the shark like that. But the point is, beginning around 1965, a team of people began working on what would become the most major development in operating systems to ever be created: Multics, or the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service. Considering that without Multics, UNIX would have had no basis, its creation was a turning point in the move from using computers as nothing more than a scientist’s novelty to turning them into a practical tool for connecting people and sharing information between them.
After all, the entire notion of using a computer for a network was in its infancy back in 1965. Even the Pentagon was only beginning to realize that if the most high ranking military and civilian command personnel were going to be holed up in bunkers during a nuclear war (or even if a conventional war were to break out, and they were scattered all over the world), command functions would need to be extremely malleable and open to being issued from a lot of different sources. This led to the inevitable realization that computers could (at least theoretically) be programmed to talk to one another.
But of course, that was another era entirely. As time went on, Multics become a more and more refined operating system with an increasingly robust amount of functions about it. And say what you will about the longevity of any operating system, but the final instance of Multics (which was the Canadian Department of National Defense’s 5-processor configuration in Halifax) only went down on October 31, 2000. Considering that it took 35 years for Multics to become completely obsolete, you have to wonder about new operating systems.