PDP1 3632

re:

from keykos history, here is account of Tymshare offering vm370 based timesharing starting in the early 70s

from above:

About that time Tymshare had become profitable and we could look beyond the current crisis. Three of us, Dale Jordan, Bill Weiher, and myself began a series of Thursday afternoon discussions on how to provide such a platform. Capabilities were known to each of us but none of us buttumed that only they held the solution. After a number of these Thursday meetings the design proposals began to take on a pure capability flavor Ñ no other architectures seemed suitable.

Dale Jordan wrote a paper outlining the problem and hinted at the solutions. Some time had pbutted when IBM announced a version of the 370 with demand paging. We studied that architecture and deemed it suitable for out plans. The micro processor was still very micro and still years from having the oomph to sport a powerful OS of any variety, let alone oomph to solve our customers problems. Also IBM offered VM-370 somewhat like their previous CP-67 which provided a virtual machine that provided multiple images of a real machine in a decent timesharing environment. At the time Tymshare was providing timesharing services on the SDS 940 and also on DEC's PDP-10. It seemed clear that a number of customers wanted to use 370 computing remotely. Relatively few companies provided internal interactive access to their main frames. The computing centers of some companies did but were trusted less than a commercial third party such as Tymshare. Tymshare adapted VM-370 to Tymnet and developed a good business selling 370 cycles.

... snip ...

tymshare went on to develop capability-based system under vm370 for 370 called gnosis. when tymshare was acquired by m-d in the mid-80s, some number of things were spun off ... tymnet eventually going to B-T and gnosis was spun off as Keykos. minor trivia, as part of spinning of gnosis (as Keykos), i was brought in to audit gnosis (I still have paper manuals).

also note the ncss, ramis, nomad, focus, connection: and

from above:

In 1973, NCSS decided to fund the development of an alternative product, which in October of 1975 was released under the name NOMAD. That same month, Gerry Cohen left Mathematica and released a product called FOCUS, which he made available on Tymshare Inc's competing time-sharing system, with the promise to RAMIS users that their applications could run un-modified, and at a significant discount over NCSS' charges for RAMIS applications.

... snip ...

Norm's website

Eros was subsequently spawned based on the keykos work

which has since morphed into and

misc. past posts mentioning gnosis

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