Yes and no. The original concept for Multics was to have commands execute as separate subsidiary processes (a la Unix). However, Multics processes turned out to be rather expensive (computationally), and so the plan was changed to make them  subroutines, called from the command interpreter. (The ability of Multics to dynamically link to a subroutine in any 'file' in the filesystem was a key thing in making this work - you could compile a new command, and then try it out right away, without having to link up a new version of the command interpreter.) Multics did always have the ability for anyone to start a subsidiary process, but it just wasn't used much.  (talk)