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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)