"Time sharing in large, fast computers" And the following note appears at the end of John McCarthy's Reminiscences on the History of Time Sharing (1984):C. Strachey in Proceedings of the IFIP Congress, 1959, pp.336-341 Don Knuth, who was curious about who had done what, wrote to Christopher Strachey and got the following reply. OXFORD UNIVERSITY COMPUTING LABORATORY 45 Banbury Road PROGRAMMING RESEARCH GROUP Oxford OX2 6PE 1st May 1974 Professor D. E. Knuth Stanford University Computer Science Department Stanford, California 94305 U.S.A. Dear Don: The paper I wrote called `Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers' was read at the first (pre IFIP) conference at Paris in l960. It was mainly about multi--programming (to avoid waiting for peripherals) although it did envisage this going on at the same time as a programmer was debugging his program at a console. I did not envisage the sort of console system which is now so confusingly called time sharing. I still think my use of the term is the more natural. I am afraid I am so rushed at the moment, being virtually alone in the PRG and having just moved house, that I have no time to look up any old notes I may have. I hope to be able to do so while settling in and if I find anything of interest I will let you know. Don't place too much reliance on Halsbury's accuracy. He tends to rely on memory and get the details wrong. But he was certainly right to say that in l960 `time sharing' as a phrase was much in the air. It was, however, generally used in my sense rather than in John McCarthy's sense of a CTSS-like object. Best wishes, Yours sincerely, C. Strachey Professor of Computation University of Oxford |
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