Multics Contributions

I started using Multics sometime around MR6.1 (March 1978) to MR6.5 (September 1978), and first had my own account on February 8, 1979, right before MR7.0 (March 1979). I started working for Honeywell some time around MR10.0 (October 1982) and started working at the Phoenix Multics Development Center (PMDC) in October 1983 (MR10.1); I stayed there until I left for grad school the summer of 1989, before the release of MR12.3 (December 1989).

Unofficial contributions (private tools), 1980-86:

Possible MCRs of mine (based on source code comments before the history_comment command added the MCR numbers); I started off fixing bugs in commands and subroutines.

This is probably an incomplete list that I gathered from a quick scan of the source tree.

Then I wrote the message_facility_ MTB-659, July 10, 1984, which was a substantial rewrite of the interactive message facility to make its functions available through a subroutine and rewrite all of the commands to use it. I had done a fair amount of work on it in the years prior, with guidance from Jim Davis. I have an old email from Chris Jones who was the message facility maintainer in July 1982 before I started working in the Multics Development Center asking if I wanted to work on what he had written up as an earlier (July 30, 1981) MTB-533, Proposed Message Faclity Enhancements, which I should have cited in mine, as well as acknowledged Jim Davis's guidance. I had already implemented most of the send_message features before December 22, 1980 (per saved old email), and was getting it installed with help from JRDavis. That version is lost to history because I did a complete rewrite, but one history comment references: "2) change(84-06-26,Lippard), approve(), audit(), install(): Modified to merge in "accepting" (based on the original "accepting" written by James R. Davis on April 29, 1980 which was based on an idea of Paul Benjamin)." From this point on the history comments show the MCR numbers, so I put them in MCR sequential order even though it's not quite chronological for when the changes got made. I quit Honeywell in August of 1988 to go to grad school.