CTSS
CTSS, short for Compatible Time-Sharing System, is an early operating system developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computation Center in the early 1960s. It was one of the first systems to implement time-sharing, a model that lets many users interact with a central mainframe simultaneously through terminals rather than submitting jobs in batches. CTSS aimed to demonstrate the practicality of interactive computing for a broad user community.
The project was led by Fernando J. Corbató and a research team at MIT. CTSS ran on
CTSS’s significance extends beyond its immediate utility. It helped establish core concepts later refined in time-sharing
Related topics include Multics and the broader history of time-sharing in computing.