Talk:Running ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System) on the KL-10

Dates in comment

"the ITS pager was designed and built in 1968"

Do you have a source for this? All I have is ITS Hardware Memo 2 and 2A, both from February 1970.

"ITS itself has existed since 1966"

Project MAC Progress Report IV says it was operational July 1967. I don't know exactly when ITS was started, do you?
Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 08:07, 9 June 2023 (CEST)

That comment is exactly as RG wrote it. (The whole page is his text exactly, with only formatting changes to make it 'work' in Mediawiki, which is generally not fixed-format. Hence my use of Mediawiki tables in a number of places to reproduce the tables which he had in the original, using fixed-format to create them there. The only changes to the text I have made were a few spelling corrections; I decided corrections were preferable to use of '(sic)', or leaving the errors in, un-flagged. Oh, and I changed "timesharing" to 'time-sharing' to make the link easy.)

So it's RG who wrote, at the time this was written (I'm not sure exactly when, it's not dated internally; IIRC, MC may have been the first KL10 sold by DEC, and this was written before it arrived), that "the ITS pager was designed and built in 1968" and "ITS itself has existed since 1966". Recent history at the time (1974 or so); but, of course, his memory might have been wrong. Sorry I can't easily help more! Jnc (talk) 08:50, 9 June 2023 (CEST)

Thanks, that's great! This is interesting information even, as you note, numbers may be approximate due to wetware memory. The RG; KLPAG XGP timestamp is from July 1975. But they are plausible. ITS may have been in the works for more than six months, and the pager memos may have been written well after the hardware was constructed.

Yes, rumor has it MC was the first KL10 shipped out of DEC. Its serial number is 1038, and earlier known numbers are all DEC internal. I see evidence of MC in place at Tech Sq in summer 1975.

Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 09:10, 9 June 2023 (CEST)