Compatible Time-Sharing System

So we have from Olin Sievert, who was a Multician, longtime Multician, We have the MIT Multics Archive, which is 60 bankers' boxes full of listing, Project Mac memos.

Some of it goes even into CTSS, which is the compatible time-sharing system that was developed on the 7094 at MIT in the early 60s, including source listings for CTSS.

But we're working on ways to archive this material and then get it to either Bitsavers or archive.org.

Tell me about some of the plans for the ICM, near term and long term.

There were no such things as users, their files, or logging into a system.

In comes the CTSS, which was the evolution at the time.

A computer that had a rudimentary operating system, which allowed multiple users to simultaneously use its processing power, because the CPU would split its processing time amongst the jobs of these several users.

Amazing.

Anyway, with more than one user, you can't have a no man's land in your system where anyone can do whatever they want wherever in memory.

Different users need their own separate private space with their own private files to do their work.

And that is exactly what the CTSS provided.

When accessing the mainframe through a teletype terminal, each user would have their account and they could use the keyword login followed by their username to access their own resources in the mainframe.

Clean writes it down in 1951.

And nobody builds it into software until Ken Thompson puts it into the QED editor on MIT's CTSS and publishes Regular Expression Search Algorithm in the Communications of the ACM in June of 1968.

Korn, first implementation.

Herman, first one.