Dartmouth Time Sharing System

The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, or DTSS for short, was the first large-scale time-sharing system to be implemented successfully. Inspired by a PDP-1-based time-sharing system at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College submitted a grant to NSF in 1962 (funded in 1964)[1]. Its implementation began in 1963 by a student team [2] under the direction of Kemeny and Kurtz with the aim of providing easy access to computing facilities for all members of the college.[3] On May 1, 1964 at 4 AM the system began operations with the simulataneous where it remained so until the end of 1999.[4][5] DTSS was originally implemented to run on a GE-200 series computer with a GE Datanet 30 as a terminal processor that also managed the 235. Later, DTSS was reimplemented on the GE 635[1], still using the Datanet 30 for terminal control. The 635 version provided interactive time-sharing to up to nearly 300 simultaneous users in the 1970s, a very large number at the time.