In 1964, GE had helped the Dartmouth College NH to develop an interactive system for teaching programming. The hardware was a GE-200 front-ended by a communication processor developed initially for store and forward communication messages the GE Datanet-30. The terminals were AT&T Teletype 33 ASCII typewriters connected through 300 bauds Bell modems.
The Dartmouth College, perhaps inspired from MIT CTSS, had developed a special purpose operating-system including an interpretive processor of the BASIC (Beginner's All Symbolic Instruction Code) language also created for this system, christened GE-265.
General Electric started to market the BASIC service, through a special division that took over the maintenance of the Dartmouth College software. As the hardware perspective of the GE-200 was limited, the Dartmouth College accepted the GE offer of porting the DTSS (Dartmouth Time-Sharing System) to the GE-600. GE started to replace its GE-265 by GE-635 as Mark-III systems.
The hardware of Mark-III system was originally completely standard, but the software was developed and maintained independently from Phoenix. General Electric Computer Division and its affiliates (e.g., Bull General-Electric) were not entitled to license their customers with Mark-III software.
Mark-III systems main center was concentrated in Cleveland OH, but expanded with a center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The customers of the timesharing service were connected transparently to the computer centers.
With Mark-III, the applications were expanded to email and batch applications. Eventually, GE added to the base systems several IBM 370 computers to provide batch services without recompiling applications to the peculiarities of GE-600 code (differences in scientific operations precision in particular.
GE ISD was later instrumental in the evolution of Honeywell Large Systems by pushing Phoenix to use IBM and IBM compatible peripheral subsystems on the DPS-8 product line. GEISD had developed since the early 70s their own versions of peripheral subsystems shared between Honeywell and IBM computers and pressured Honeywell to introduce a standard facility.
After acquisition of the GE computer business by Honeywell in 1970, General Electric kept the timesharing business in an Information Services Division that is still alive. The ISD European Operation was momentarily kept inside Honeywell-Bull, but was retroceded to GE circa 1975."
Y'all gotta realize at the time, your choices were COBOL, FORTRAN, JCL, etc.
The history is: In 1964 or 1965, the GE manager, Arnold Spielberg (you might have seen his son's movies) came back from a conference where he had seen BASIC. He realized this was a radical thing - a programming language a "normal" engineer or.. (shudder).. a manager could write a program in - interactively. To that point, *everything* was batch.
They first put it on a GE 250, and were the first folks to figure out the interactive job shop. Basically (all puns intended:^) they charged for resources - time, disc space, etc.
They hired the students from Univ Chicago who had experience with BASIC. They paid them as consultants, ie about $200/day - they could not get the students to leave - the students were sleeping under their desks!
This was the real start of command line shells and "real" interactive shells/languages.
(My father was on the team, and I knew many of the other team members. The team went on to create CALL360, another radical OS, and the first SpectraPhysics UPC scanner.)
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I got a couple of details wrong.
BASIC came from Dartmouth - brainfart.
BTW - my first programming experience was an ASR33 in our spare bedroom connected to the GE mainframe.
http://febcm.club.fr/english/gecos_to_gcos8_part_1.htm
"Mark-III and General Electric Information System
In 1964, GE had helped the Dartmouth College NH to develop an interactive system for teaching programming. The hardware was a GE-200 front-ended by a communication processor developed initially for store and forward communication messages the GE Datanet-30. The terminals were AT&T Teletype 33 ASCII typewriters connected through 300 bauds Bell modems.
The Dartmouth College, perhaps inspired from MIT CTSS, had developed a special purpose operating-system including an interpretive processor of the BASIC (Beginner's All Symbolic Instruction Code) language also created for this system, christened GE-265.
General Electric started to market the BASIC service, through a special division that took over the maintenance of the Dartmouth College software. As the hardware perspective of the GE-200 was limited, the Dartmouth College accepted the GE offer of porting the DTSS (Dartmouth Time-Sharing System) to the GE-600. GE started to replace its GE-265 by GE-635 as Mark-III systems.
The hardware of Mark-III system was originally completely standard, but the software was developed and maintained independently from Phoenix. General Electric Computer Division and its affiliates (e.g., Bull General-Electric) were not entitled to license their customers with Mark-III software.
Mark-III systems main center was concentrated in Cleveland OH, but expanded with a center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The customers of the timesharing service were connected transparently to the computer centers.
With Mark-III, the applications were expanded to email and batch applications. Eventually, GE added to the base systems several IBM 370 computers to provide batch services without recompiling applications to the peculiarities of GE-600 code (differences in scientific operations precision in particular.
GE ISD was later instrumental in the evolution of Honeywell Large Systems by pushing Phoenix to use IBM and IBM compatible peripheral subsystems on the DPS-8 product line. GEISD had developed since the early 70s their own versions of peripheral subsystems shared between Honeywell and IBM computers and pressured Honeywell to introduce a standard facility.
After acquisition of the GE computer business by Honeywell in 1970, General Electric kept the timesharing business in an Information Services Division that is still alive. The ISD European Operation was momentarily kept inside Honeywell-Bull, but was retroceded to GE circa 1975."
Y'all gotta realize at the time, your choices were COBOL, FORTRAN, JCL, etc. The history is: In 1964 or 1965, the GE manager, Arnold Spielberg (you might have seen his son's movies) came back from a conference where he had seen BASIC. He realized this was a radical thing - a programming language a "normal" engineer or .. (shudder) .. a manager could write a program in - interactively. To that point, *everything* was batch.
They first put it on a GE 250, and were the first folks to figure out the interactive job shop. Basically (all puns intended :^) they charged for resources - time, disc space, etc.
They hired the students from Univ Chicago who had experience with BASIC. They paid them as consultants, ie about $200/day - they could not get the students to leave - the students were sleeping under their desks!
This was the real start of command line shells and "real" interactive shells/languages.
(My father was on the team, and I knew many of the other team members. The team went on to create CALL360, another radical OS, and the first SpectraPhysics UPC scanner.)