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by PhantomGremlin 3984 days ago
that's probably the entire RAM of those systems at the time; several KB at most

Dartmouth Time Sharing System[1] started out on relatively small computers, but by 1965 was running on a very state-of-the-art mainframe, the GE 635[2]. It had about 1 MB memory. That doesn't sound like much right now, but:

   The 635 version provided interactive time-sharing
   to up to nearly 300 simultaneous users in the
   1970s, a very large number at the time
It's the wheel of reincarnation. What we now call "the cloud" was called "time-sharing" in the 1960s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-600_series

3 comments

I love that observation. Here is the reference for fun: http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...
It looks like they used the GE-235 originally, which only had 8K words of 20 bits each (i.e. 20KB.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series

Also, much of the actual time-sharing control on those GE's was handled by a separate communications processor (e.g. Datanet-30) with its own memory space and registers.