DTSS

DTSS, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, was a pioneering time-sharing operating system developed at Dartmouth College in the 1960s for General Electric mainframes, most notably the GE-635. Led by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, the project aimed to bring interactive computing to students and researchers, allowing multiple users to access a central computer concurrently through teletype terminals. DTSS replaced batch-only processing with an online environment in which users could enter commands, edit programs, and run computations in real time.

A key achievement of DTSS was the development and inclusion of Dartmouth BASIC, the first widely used version of the BASIC programming language, released for DTSS in 1964. The language was designed to be easy to learn for beginners and used on the same system that hosted coursework, demonstrations, and student programs. The environment provided an accessible platform for learning programming and exploring algorithms interactively.

DTSS influenced later time-sharing systems by demonstrating the feasibility of interactive, multi-user computing in an educational setting. It helped popularize the concept of accessible, interactive computing and contributed to the culture of computer education during the era. While the DTSS hardware and software were eventually superseded by newer systems, the project’s emphasis on interactivity and user-friendly programming environments left a lasting imprint on the history of computing.

Today, DTSS is studied as a foundational step in the development of time-sharing, interactive computing, and the origins of BASIC, as well as a milestone in the evolution of computer-assisted education.