TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: More on Internet and Patent History

Re: More on Internet and Patent History

Scott Dorsey (kludge@panix.com)
5 Apr 2007 10:37:11 -0400

In article <telecom26.92.4@telecom-digest.org>,
<hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:

> Time sharing required a facility known as "Dynamic Address
> Translation". I wonder if this was patented. IBM chose not to
> include it in its original System/360 line in 1964 and not support
> timesharing, but General Electric did and their machines were used
> for early timeshared computers. IBM later added this to its
> System/360 model 67 and its System/370 line. Time sharing proved to
> be a lot harder to implemented than first predicted; it was a heavy
> CPU and memory drain which was a problem on the technology of the
> 1960s.

You don't really _need_ memory management to do timesharing, but it
sure helps a whole lot and keeps users from killing one another. IBM
made an aftermarket DAT box that could be attached to the 360/50 and
some other models in order to run TSO, when it became clear that this
was a big deal for computer buyers.

> Some in the early 1960s predicted time sharing would allow
> "democratization" of computer services, by allowing acess by anyone
> through a terminal to an expensive computer. Some of these published
> predictions described the Internet as we have it today [in 2007] as
> being available in 1990, it took another full decade for that to come
> to fruition.

Most of those predictions actually described the internet of 1990,
really, which was greatly superior in some ways to the internet of
today.

--scott

Telecom content? Not much.

-- 
"C'est un Nagra.  C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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