Abstract – TSS/8 is an existence proof for a small-scale time-sharing system. Design, development, and performance analysis have occurred in quasiparallel. Performance analysis includes two models and two levels of simulation (using SIMULA). The final simulation, an accurate model of the real operating system, predicts the observed behavior.
C. Gordon Bell, “Design and Behavior of TSS/8: a PDP-8 Based Time-sharing System,” 1969.
The first operating system I used in this life was TSS/8, which I encountered in 1972. I wrote a few small programs in BASIC, the most complex of which was an unbeatable Tic-Tac-Toe program. I also learned FOCAL, an interpreted language created by Digital Equipment Corporation. I’ll write more about that in a future post.
As an historical note, this post should really be dated June 9, 1969, but it is an artifact of the UNIX operating system that the Unix epoch starts on January 1, 1970 at 12:00 am GMT. As this WordPress site is hosted on Linux, which inherits the Unix epoch, no post can be dated any earlier than this post has been dated.