Dartmouth Time Sharing System
| Developer | Dartmouth College |
|---|---|
| Written in | Dartmouth BASIC, ALGOL 60, FORTRAN, COBOL, APL, DXPL, DYNAMO, GMAP, LISP, MIX, PL/I, SNOBOL |
| Working state | Discontinued |
| Platforms | GE-200 series |
| Default user interface | Command line interface |
| Official website | dtss |
The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, or DTSS for short, is a discontinued time-sharing operating system, the first large-scale, to be implemented successfully.
DTSS was inspired by a PDP-1-based time-sharing system at Bolt, Beranek and Newman. In 1962, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College submitted a grant for the development of a new time-sharing system to NSF (funded in 1964). Its implementation began in 1963, by a student team under the direction of Kemeny and Kurtz with the aim of providing easy access to computing facilities for all members of the college. On May 1, 1964, at 4:00 a.m., the system began operations. It remained in operation until the end of 1999. DTSS was originally implemented to run on a GE-200 series computer with a GE DATANET-30 as a terminal processor that also managed the 235. Later, DTSS was reimplemented on the GE 635, still using the DATANET-30 for terminal control. The 635 version provided interactive time-sharing to up to nearly 300 simultaneous users in the 1970s, a very large number at the time.
Kemeny and Kurtz intended for students in technical and nontechnical fields to use DTSS. They arranged for the second trimester of the freshman mathematics class to include a requirement for writing and debugging four Dartmouth BASIC programs. By 1968, more than 80% of Dartmouth students had experience in computer programming. 80 classes included "official" computer use, including those in engineering, classics, geography, sociology, and Spanish. 57% of DTSS use was for courses and 16% for research. 27% was for casual use and entertainment, which the university stated "is in no sense regarded as frivolous"; on the contrary, Kemeny and Kurtz were pleased to find that 40% of all faculty members—not just those in technical fields—used DTSS, and that many students continued using the system after no longer being required to. Kemeny wrote in a brochure describing the system that just as a student could enter the library and borrow a book without asking permission or explaining his purpose, "any student may walk into Kiewit Computation Center, sit down at a console, and use the time-sharing system. No one will ask if he is solving a serious research problem, doing his homework the easy way, playing a game of football, or writing a letter to his girlfriend".
...
Wikipedia