BBN Time-Sharing System
Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) | |
Working state | Historic |
---|---|
Initial release | September 1962 |
Platforms | PDP-1 |
The BBN Time-Sharing System was an early
History
With the PDP-1 installed at BBN, in 1960 Licklider took on
- John’s invention of time-sharing and his telling me about his ideas all occurred before the PDP-1 existed. When I first saw the PDP-1 at the Eastern Joint Computer Conference, I realized that it was the perfect low-cost vehicle for implementing John's ideas. That is why I specified that several of the modifications for time sharing be part of the PDP-1b.
McCarthy recalled in 1989:[9]
- I kept arguing with him. I said "Well, you’d have to ... get an interrupt system." And he said, "We can do that. You'd have to get some kind of swapper." I said “We can do that."
Accordingly, a BBN team, largely led by Sheldon Boilen, built custom hardware add-ons to the company's second PDP-1 to provide an external interrupt system and a magnetic drum for swapping storage. To this end, BBN acquired the first UNIVAC FASTRAND rotating drum, with a 45-Mbyte storage capacity and an access time of about 0.1 second.[10]
In Fall 1962, BBN conducted a public demonstration of the BBN Time-Sharing System, with one operator in Washington, D.C., and two in Cambridge.[11]
Hardware support for time-sharing
As described in McCarthy et al., the computer's hardware was as follows: "The PDP-1 is a single address binary computer with an 18 bit [Word (computer architecture)|word]] and five
See also
References
- ^ "A Time-Sharing Debugging System for a Small Computer", by J. McCarthy (Stanford), S. Boilen (Bolt Beranek and Newman), E. Fredkin (Information International Inc.), and J. C. R. Licklider (ARPA), Proceedings of the Spring Joint Computer Conference, 1963, page 56 [1]
- ISBN 978-0-19-286207-5.
- ^ History-Computer.com: DEC PDP-1 History
- ^ A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN, David Walden and Raymond Nickerson, editors, Waterside Publishing, 2nd edition, 2012., page 53
- ^ Culture of Innovation, page 53
- ^ BBN's formal acceptance of the first PDP-1 was reported in Computers and Automation, April 1961, page 8B. [2]
- ^ Culture of Innovation, page 14
- ^ Quoted in Culture of Innovation, page 54
- ^ "An Interview with John McCarthy," 2 March 1989, oral history conducted by William Aspray, transcript OH 156, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, p. 5.[3]
- ^ Culture of Innovation, page 29
- ^ Culture of Innovation, page 14