Design considerations for an educational time-sharing system

Abstract

In 1963, Dartmouth College developed a time-sharing system for the GE-235 and Datanet-30 computers. This was a general-purpose multilingual computing system in which the language BASIC achieved great popularity. This system had a great impact on the Dartmouth campus, and its successes led to its adoption by GE as a commerical time-sharing system. But at Dartmouth, the success of this system led to its own demise; the demand for the use of the computer by students, faculty members, and a substantial number of outside users meant that the system always operated near its peak capacity---just under 40 users. Thus this system which initially was judged to provide a convenient and powerful computing service grew (in the view of those grown accustomed) to have certain unsatisfactory characteristics. Nonetheless, the system continued to provide good service for the functions for which it was specifically tailored--- providing good edit-compile-and-go service for short BASIC programs. In fact, it was this service which drew more and more people to use the computer.