It's not depressing. Unix philosophy is to keep things simple and modular. And this is exactly what led to its remarkable success. While Multics died under its own weight.
Wow, it has really been five years! I thought I was safe making betting time frames long enough no one will remember. Fortunately, though, my students were all too scared to bet me after watching ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-PI8Fo1vzUPM.html.
Although Multics software was not open source, it came with full source code, apart from software which was sold separately (in the ">unbundled" hierarchy). The Multics operating system was made open source and published on the Internet (web.mit.edu/multics-history) in 2007, and there's an emulator under development (and pretty far along--it has successfully booted).
I don't go into this in this lecture since its focused on the OS aspects, but I don't think anything I do say is inconsistent with the history here (if you do think something in the lecture is actually incorrect, feel free to explain what it is). The most definitive source on how and why C was developed (and desire for a rudimentary type system is certainly part of the story) is Dennis Ritchie's article: www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
