Research

ORVYL and WYLBUR are the names associated with the Stanford Timesharing System.[1][2] Initially developed in 1967-68 for the IBM S/360-67 mainframe computer, it was one of the first time-sharing systems to be made available for IBM computers.

ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System (named in comparison with the Compatible Time-Sharing System also in use at MIT), was an early, revolutionary, and influential time-sharing operating system from MIT; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC. In addition to being technically influential (both in the operating system itself, as well as applications developed on it), it was one of the projects most important in the original development of the hacker culture (as documented in Steven Levy's book Hackers).

The Berkeley Timesharing System was a pioneering time-sharing operating system implemented between 1964 and 1967 at the University of California, Berkeley. It was designed as part of Project Genie and marketed by Scientific Data Systems for the SDS 940 computer system. It was the first commercial time-sharing which allowed general-purpose user programming, including machine language.

The TOPS-10 System (Timesharing / Total OPerating System) was a computer operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for the PDP-10 (or DECsystem-10) mainframe computer launched in 1967. TOPS-10 evolved from the earlier "Monitor" software for the PDP-6 and -10 computers; this was renamed TOPS-10 in 1970.

The MCP (Master Control Program) is the proprietary operating system of the Burroughs large systems including the Unisys Clearpath/MCP systems. Originally written in 1961 in ESPOL (Executive Systems Programming Language), which itself was an extension of Burroughs Extended ALGOL, in the 1970s it was converted to NEWP, a better structured, more robust, and more secure form of ESPOL. The MCP was a leader in many areas, including: the first operating system to manage multiple processors, the first commercial implementation of virtual memory, and the first OS written exclusively in a high-level language.

The Compatible Time-Sharing System, or the CTSS, was one of the first time-sharing operating systems; it was developed at MIT's Computation Center. CTSS was first demonstrated in 1961, and was operated at MIT until 1973. During part of this time, MIT's Project MAC had a second copy of CTSS, but the system did not spread beyond two sites (though this applies to many early computer systems). CTSS was described in a paper presented at the 1962 Spring Joint Computer Conference.

IBSYS was the tape based operating system that IBM supplied with its IBM 7090 and IBM 7094 computers. A similar operating system (but with several significant differences), also called IBSYS, was provided with IBM 7040 and IBM 7044 computers. IBSYS was based on FORTRAN Monitor System (FMS) and SHARE Operating System.

The SHARE Operating System, also known as SOS, was created in 1959 as an improvement on the General Motors GM-NAA I/O operating system, the first operating system, by the SHARE user group. The main target was to improve the sharing of programs over GM-NAA I/O.

The University of Michigan Executive System, or UMES, a batch operating system developed at the University of Michigan in 1958, was widely used at many universities. Based on the General Motors Executive System for the IBM 701, UMES was revised to work on the mainframe computers in use at the University of Michigan during this time (IBM 704, 709, and 7090) and to work better for the small student jobs that were expected to be the primary work load at the University.

BESYS (Bell Operating System) was an early computing environment originally implemented as a batch processing operating system in 1957 at Bell Labs for the IBM 704 computer. The initial version of the system BESYS2 was created by George Mealy and Gwen Hansen with Wanda Lee Mammel and utilized IBM's FORTRAN and North American's symbolic assembly program SAP programming languages. It was designed to efficiently deal with a large number of jobs originating on punched cards and producing results suitable for printing on paper and punched cards. The system also provided processing capabilities for data stored on magnetic tapes and magnetic disk storage units. Typically punched card and print processing was handled off line by peripheral IBM Electronic Accounting Machines, IBM 1401 computers and eventually direct coupled computers.