|
|
|
|
|
|
by gumby
1784 days ago
|
|
|
I don’t know why you say that — the ITS machines were used by everybody in 545 tech square, researchers, admins and “secretaries” alike (both AI and LCS), from when I was there until they were gradually retired. The one TOPS-20 machine, Oz, didn’t arrive until times had changed and a lot of alternatives were already in use. As for time sharing: ITS stands for “Incompatible Timesharing System” (a joke on CTSS), with memory protection, etc used by multiple users on terminals and over the net starting around/before the Multics project (all of which preceded Emacs of course) |
|
|
ITS version 1 is counted from 1967 as well (first mentions of PDP-6 ITS), simply because Project MAC couldn't deliver computing resources needed by other groups, not to mention AI Lab tended to modify the hw all the time (a fate AFAIK common to all ITS systems).
The anecdote about secretaries extending Emacs came from RMS, describing a group that used the shared "utility" computing resources provided by Project MAC (later turned into LCS) and who used a manual that didn't mention the word programming, compiled by who-knows-who, which showed how to modify Multics Emacs (which was the second Lisp-based Emacs) to user's liking.