[Simh] TSS-8 and ETOS free-redistribution licenses (PDP-8 operating systems)

[Al Kossow]

On 1/16/17 12:02 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:

> I don't recall any mention of CMU in his story, but perhaps the other person
> was from CMU.  I can ask him, of course.
>

"Computer Engineering" pg 180


Another interesting application
was the TSSj8 small-scale general purpose
timesharing system developed by Carnegie Mellon
University and DEC [van de Goor et
aI., 1969]. While only a hundred or so systems
were sold, TSS/8* was significant because it es-
tablished the notion that multiprogramming
applied even to minicomputers. Until recently,
TSS/8 was the lowest cost (per system and per
user) and highest performance/cost timesharing
system. A major side benefit of TSS/8 was the
training of the implementors, who went on to
implement the RSTS timesharing system for the
PDP-11 based on the BASIC language


*TSS/8 was designed at Carnegie-Mellon University with graduate student Adrian van de Goor, in reaction to the cost,
performance, reliability, and complexity of IBM's TSS/360 (for their Model 67). Although the TSS/360 was not marketed.
it eventually worked and contributed some ideas and trained thousands for IBM. At Carnegie-Mellon (CMU), a TSS/8
operated until 1974 when the special swapping disk expired. The cost per user or per job tended to be about! /20 of the
TSS/360 system CMU ran.