Talk:Berkeley Timesharing System

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Link and a quote

Project Genie: Berkeley’s piece of the computer revolution

In the next three years they developed the bulk of the software suite, including the timesharing system, the line-oriented text editor QED, the now-standard fork operation to create new processes, command-line completion, state-restoring crash recovery and many other innovative features.

68.246.234.50 (talk) 20:54, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The link for the article mentioned above has moved: https://engineering.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/files/docs/2007Fall.pdf

It's from the Fall, 2007 issue of Forefront, the magazine from the College of Engineering at Berkeley, page 22. The article itself does address several of the questions below. Mahousu (talk) 14:11, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Name?

Right now there is not much info here independent of the SDS 940 and Project Genie articles. In fact, the only places I find something like this name used, it is "Berkeley time-sharing system", that is, with a dash and lower case. This makes me think it was not a proper name but a descriptive one. So perhaps it should be merged? Might also be confused with CalTSS which was a follow-on project for the CDC 6400 it seems. W Nowicki (talk) 04:25, 17 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I learned to program on the SDS-940 in 1968. My high school rented time on one, owned by Com-Share Inc. of Ann Arbor Michigan. Later, in the summer of 1972, I got a summer job at Com-Share as a programmer. At that time, Com-Share and Tymshare Inc. owned, between them, most of the SDS-940 machines ever made. Com-Share called their version of the Berkeley Timesharing System Commander I -- at the time, they were migrating from the 24-bit SDS-940 to the 32-bit XDS Sigma 7 (Formerly the SDS Sigma 7), which they called the Commander II system. I still have my Commander II Fortran manual, but nothing from the Commander I system. I hope the additonal company and product names help someone track down more documentation. Douglas W. Jones (talk) 22:23, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

First general-purpose time-sharing system?

What was the relative timing of DEC's PDP-6/10 time-sharing system and the 940 time sharing system? I used the Dial-Data 940 in 1967-68, TOPS-10 in 1970, ITS (PDP-10) starting in 1971 (which of course was not commercial), and occasionally TOPS-20 later, but I don't know the timing of their releases. --Macrakis (talk) 23:30, 4 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The PDP-6 was first shipped in June 1964. It's Monitor timesharing system also allowed general-purpose user programming. But I don't know whether it also shipped in 1964 or was completed later. This seems to indicate it was available well before 1967: https://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/tops-10 Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 11:58, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

These listings are from 1965: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp6/tsExec1.4/ Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 12:01, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article says "A small number of companies were already offering time-sharing services. Among the early service providers were Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), which first demonstrated time-sharing in 1962, IBM, CEIR, Keydata, Rand Corporation and Comshare. Most were using early forms of hardware from Digital Equipment that included PDP-1, PDP-2, PDP5 and PDP6. (Scientific Data Systems did not ship the first Tymshare SDS 940 system until April 1966)."

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2016/12/102762440-05-01-acc.pdf

Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 07:10, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]