Talk:Dartmouth Time Sharing System

Untitled
I think DTSS is actually fairly important in the bigger scheme of things as it was also used at the U.S. Naval Academy, where both DTSS and applications created for it were in use from the early 70's through the mid-90's. Most of the current senior officers (Admirals & Captains) in the U.S. Navy who are academy graduates learned computing using DTSS on big teletype machines. I registered for classes online in 1974--yes, USNA has had online registration since the 70's--and one of my classmates even hacked the system and registered early. The online registration program was still in use when I did a Web assist visit to the Academy in 1994. I will try to come up with some documentable source material as I know that personal experience is falling into disrepute here at Wikipedia--even though it is certainly original source material. Maybe I should just write a paper on it and then quote myself. Ray Trygstad (talk) 17:44, 28 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree, DTSS was very important. It was the template for many commercial time sharing systems, including Control Data's KRONOS and NOS systems, HP's timesharing systems, and UNIVAX's RTB (real time basic) system.  Probably others as well.  The history of operating systems often appears MIT-centric, but I think that is partly a matter of bias.  Contemporary work simply has not gotten the same attention. DonPMitchell (talk) 19:33, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Not just East Coast
In 1972, the five high schools of the Lakeshore School Board in West Island Montreal (later swallowed by the Lester B. Pearson School Board) were connected up to DTSS via local number with a fancy connection, using ASR-33s. Apparently the connection charges were more than they expected(!), and the next year they switched to the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal's (ditto) overworked HP2000. It's a pity that there is so much "dark history" of non-MIT/non-ARPANET computing subjects. Ah well, the victors write the history FAQ. AndroidCat (talk) 04:54, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

I believe there were hundreds of school with teletypes connected to Dartmouth. The article mentions Goddard and the Merchant Marine Academy, but I accessed the system from Phillips Exeter and Bennington College, saw it used at UMASS, and would leave messages for my girlfriend at Abbot Academy, circa 1969-1971. Thomas144 (talk) 10:34, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I would like to add that the system was active and installed at Concord (New Hampshire) High School in 1968-69 and perhaps as early as 1967. Several other high schools in NH were also connected and eventually we had a primitive form of email allowing limited communication with other schools. As I remember,we were allowed programs up to 8K and worked primarily in BASIC with FORTRAN later available, but rarely used. We had a Teletype Model ASR-33 with paper tape reader. Limited on line storage of programs was provided —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.68.195.209 (talk) 15:54, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Integrated design environment?
"Design" or "development?" I don't want to just change this as maybe it's "design" on purpose.

First "IDE"
Article describes the feature set: edit or LIST a program and also commands to RUN or SAVE it; these are "integrated" in the sense that (a) all commands are interactive on the terminal with immediate effect, and (b) a single program is implementing the editor, commands, and the interpreter/compiler.

I am not sure what the exact criteria or delineations are for an "IDE" (which is here called a "Design" environment rather than a "Development" environment). But in any case, is this really the first IDE? It is possible, but this is certainly not the first typewriter interactive programming environment of that era. That started in the late 50s, or in 1960 if you want to talk about timesharing. (However, timesharing is orthogonal to IDE.)

Modern IDEs are usually shells that invoke various subprograms (such as compilers) and route the input and output between tools. The "integration" provided by the DTSS implementation is really nothing more than this: all the program input and commands, along with the output and/or error messages, are issued from what appears to be a single command-line interface (CLI). In particular, runtime error messages are merely printed out - there is no functionality there that particularly associates the error with editing. Unless you are saying that line numbering makes something an IDE. But line numbering is how everything always worked (since computers were invented) until "context" editing came along. And I am pretty sure that context editing had already been invented, btw (at least for paper tape).

Perhaps BASIC/DTSS was the first typewriter interactive timesharing monolithic (?) subsystem for programming. But I don't see anything that backs that claim up here.

Some possibly relevant milestones include: CTSS (1860), DAC-1 and even Sketchpad (1961); I don't know how "integrated" things were on the early IBM, DEC, and Burroughs systems before DTSS. Herbert Hellerman's partial implementation of APL (Personalized Array Translator) predates BASIC/DTSS but I don't know anything about it.

Claiming "First IDE" seems vague to me, and it's an unsourced claim. Maybe it is in some sense true! Maybe not. I imagine that some more specific claim would not be controversial. Dicirnah (talk) 09:02, 6 April 2019 (UTC)