History
ITS development was initiated in the late 1960s by those (the majority of the MIT AI Lab 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.
ITS was written in assembly, and initially developed for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 computer, and later moved to the PDP-10 once it became available, where it saw the majority of its development and use.
Although not used much after about 1982, ITS was run at MIT until 1990, and then until 1995 at Stacken Computer Club in Sweden. A few instances are still running today for historical interest, almost all on simulated PDP-10's.
Read more about this topic: Incompatible Timesharing System
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