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JOSS: a designer's view of an experimental on-line computing system

Published: 27 October 1964 Publication History

Abstract

The JOHNNIAC Open-Shop System (JOSS) is an experimental, on-line, time-shared computing system which has been in daily use by staff members of The RAND Corporation since January 1964. It was designed to give the individual scientist or engineer an easy, direct way of solving his small numerical problems without a large investment in learning to use an operating system, a compiler, and debugging tools, or in explaining his problems to a professional computer programmer and in checking the latter's results. The ease and directness of JOSS is attributable to an interpretive routine in the JOHNNIAC computer which responds quickly to instructions expressed in a simple language and transmitted over telephone lines from convenient remote electric-typewriter consoles. An evaluation of the system has shown that in spite of severe constraints on speed and size of program, and the use of an aging machine of the vacuumtube era, JOSS provides a valuable service for computational needs which cannot be satisfied by conventional, closed-shop practice.

References

[1]
Baker, C. L., JOSS: Scenario of a Filmed Report (The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, June 1964), RM-4162-PR.
[2]
Boilen, S., Fredkin, E., Licklider, J. C. R., and McCarthy, J., "A Time-Sharing Debugging System for a Small Computer," Proc. 1963 SJCC, 51.
[3]
Coffman, E. G., Jr., Schwartz, J. I., and Weissman, C, "A General-Purpose Time-Sharing System," Proc. 1964 SJCC, 397.
[4]
Corbató, F. J., Merwin-Daggett, M., and Daley, R. C, "An Experimental Time-Sharing System," Proc. 1962 SJCC, 335.
[5]
Dunn, T. M., and Morrissey, J. H., "Remote Computing---An Experimental System. Part 1: External Specifications," Proc. 1964 SJCC, 413.
[6]
McCarthy, J., "Time-Sharing Computer Systems," Management and the Computer of the Future (MIT Press, Cambridge, and Wiley, New York, 1962), p. 221.
[7]
Bobrow, D. G., and Raphael, B., "A Comparison of List-Processing Computer Languages," Comm. ACM 7, 231 (1964).
[8]
Newell, A., and Shaw, J. C, "Programming the Logic Theory Machine," Proc. 1957 WJCC, 230.
[9]
Shaw, J. C, Newell, A., Simon, H. A., and Ellis, T. O., "A Command Structure for Complex Information Processing," Proc. 1958 WJCC, 119.

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AFIPS '64 (Fall, part I): Proceedings of the October 27-29, 1964, fall joint computer conference, part I
October 1964
749 pages
ISBN:9781450378895
DOI:10.1145/1464052
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 October 1964

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