Research

The GM-NAA I/O input/output system of General Motors and North American Aviation was the first operating system for the IBM 704 computer.[1] It was created in 1956 by Robert L. Patrick of General Motors Research and Owen Mock of North American Aviation. It was based on a system monitor created in 1955 by programmers of General Motors for its IBM 701.

The LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I) was the first computer used for commercial business applications. Overseen by Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson of J. Lyons and Co., and modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC, LEO I ran its first business application in 1951. In 1954 Lyons formed LEO Computers Ltd to market LEO I and its successors LEO II and LEO III to other companies. LEO Computers eventually became part of English Electric Company (EELM) and then International Computers Limited (ICL). LEO series computers were still in use until 1981.

Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The last known running Multics installation was shut down on October 30, 2000 at the Canadian Department of National Defense in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Digitek was an early system software company located in Los Angeles, California. Digitek, co-founded in the early 1960s by three equal partners (James R. Dunlap, President plus Vice Presidents Donald Ryan and Donald Peckham who had worked together at Hughes Aircraft Company, in Culver City, California [1]), authored many of the programming language systems (compiler + runtime + intrinsic library) on various manufacturers' computer systems, including IBM, SDS, GE, Bell Labs, and many others. Anyone interested in computers during the 60's might recall frequent Digitek advertisements in Scientific American and Datamation magazines.

Computer Control Company, Inc. (1953–1966), informally known as 3C, was a pioneering minicomputer company known for its DDP-series (Digital Data Processor) computers, notably the 1963 16-bit DDP-116. It was founded in 1953 by Dr. Louis Fein, the physicist who had earlier designed the Raytheon RAYDAC computer. The company moved to Framingham, Massachusetts in 1959. Prior to the introduction of the DDP-series it developed a series of digital logical modules, initially based on vacuum tubes. In 1966 it was sold to Honeywell, Inc.. As the Computer Controls division of Honeywell, it introduced further DDP-series computer, and was a $100,000,000 business until 1970 when Honeywell purchased GE's computer division and discontinued development of the DDP line.

The GE-600 series was a family of 36-bit mainframe computers originating in the 1960s, built by General Electric (GE). When GE left the mainframe business the line was sold to Honeywell, who built similar systems into the 1990s as the division moved to Groupe Bull and then NEC.

The GE-200 series was a family of small mainframe computers of the 1960s, built by General Electric. The main machine in the line was the GE-225. It used a 20-bit word, of which 13 bits could be used for an address. Along with the basic CPU the system could also include a floating-point unit, or interestingly, a fixed-point decimal option with three 6-bit decimals per word. It had 11 I/O channel controllers, and GE sold a variety of add-ons including disks, printers and other devices. The machines were built using discrete transistors, with a typical machine including about 10,000 transistors and 20,000 diodes. They used core memory, and a standard 8k-word system held 186,000 magnetic cores.

General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS, /ˈdʒiːkɒs) is a family of operating systems oriented toward mainframe computers. The original version of GCOS was developed by General Electric from 1962; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating Supervisor). The operating system is still used today in its most recent version (GCOS 8) on servers and mainframes produced by Groupe Bull, primarily through emulation, to provide continuity with legacy mainframe environments.

The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, or DTSS for short, was the first large-scale time-sharing system to be implemented successfully. Inspired by a PDP-1-based time-sharing system at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College submitted a grant to NSF in 1962 (funded in 1964)[1]. Its implementation began in 1963 by a student team [2] under the direction of Kemeny and Kurtz with the aim of providing easy access to computing facilities for all members of the college.[3] On May 1, 1964 at 4 AM the system began operations with the simulataneous where it remained so until the end of 1999.[4][5] DTSS was originally implemented to run on a GE-200 series computer with a GE Datanet 30 as a terminal processor that also managed the 235. Later, DTSS was reimplemented on the GE 635[1], still using the Datanet 30 for terminal control. The 635 version provided interactive time-sharing to up to nearly 300 simultaneous users in the 1970s, a very large number at the time.

An Encyclopedia of the People and Machines that Made Computer History