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Multics /muhl'tiks/ n.
[from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service">[ An early time-sharing [operating system] co-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor to [CTSS]. The design was first presented in 1965, planned for operation in 1967, first operational in 1969, and took several more years to achieve respectable performance and stability.
Multics was very innovative for its time -- among other things, it provided a hierarchical file system with access control on individual files and introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files. It was also the first OS to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the only general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating by the NSA (see [Orange Book]).