Incompatible Timesharing System
| Developer | MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Project MAC |
|---|---|
| Written in | Assembly language |
| Working state | Discontinued |
| Initial release | late 1960s |
| Available in | English |
| Platforms | Digital PDP-6, PDP-10 |
ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System), is a time-sharing operating system developed principally by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with help from Project MAC. The name is the jocular complement of the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).
ITS, and the software developed on it, were technically influential far beyond their core user community. Remote "guest" or "tourist" access was easily available via the early ARPAnet, allowing many interested parties to informally try out features of the operating system and application programs. The software environment of ITS was a major influence on the hacker culture, as described in Steven Levy's book Hackers.
ITS development was initiated in the late 1960s by those (the majority of the MIT AI Lab staff at that time) who disagreed with the direction taken by Project MAC's Multics project (which had started in the mid-1960s), particularly such decisions as the inclusion of powerful system security. The name was chosen by Tom Knight as a joke on the name of the earliest MIT time-sharing operating system, the Compatible Time-Sharing System, which dated from the early 1960s.
By simplifying their system compared to Multics, ITS's authors were able to quickly produce a functional operating system for their lab. ITS was written in assembly language, originally for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 computer, but the majority of ITS development and use was on the later PDP-10.
Although not used as intensively after about 1982, ITS continued to operate at MIT until 1990, and then until 1995 at Stacken Computer Club in Sweden.
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