Steps toward a general-purpose time-sharing system using large capacity core storage and TSS/360

  • Authors:
  • Richard E. Fikes;Hugh C. Lauer;Albin L. Vareha, Jr.

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ACM '68 Proceedings of the 1968 23rd ACM national conference
  • Year:
  • 1968

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Abstract

It is our desire at the Carnegie-Mellon University Computation Center to provide to the university community a general-purpose computer utility capable of supporting the wide range of academic and research programs which are currently being advanced. In particular, we wish to develop an integrated system of processors, storage devices, communication channels, and software which will: • Accept conversational, real-time, and batch tasks at any given time and process them concurrently. • Provide languages and facilities for writing, debugging, and executing programs conversationally. • Contain a file system suitable for safely storing source code, object code, data, and output. • Accommodate the addition of new languages, new software subsystems, and new types of conversational terminals. • Accept tasks ranging in size from very small student programs and desk calculator work to very large tasks which tax all of the facilities of the system. The first attempts to provide systems having these capabilities resulted in Project MAC's CTSS at Massachusetts Institute of Technology1 and the Q-32 Time-Sharing System at System Development Corporation.2 Other early efforts produced JOSS at the RAND Corporation3 and BASIC at Dartmouth College.4 The latter two systems emphasized conversational computing, ease of operation, and file facilities, but were dedicated systems in that they provided only a single algebraic language.