[ih] We can hang up now, it's all done.

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Mon Nov 23 06:35:48 PST 2009


    > From: Marty Lyons <marty at martylyons.com>

    > I have a paper on this very topic 

To try and extend the record a bit, ITS had an early one, too - the 'ITS
Reference Manual 1.5' (1969) records a ":SEND" command, but I don't know how
much earlier than that it was actually done. Since ITS was done by people
familiar with CTSS, no doubt the CTSS one was the progenitor.

If you want a copy of that ITS manual, it's available as a (scanned) document
from MIT. There's a link to it on the Wikipedia ITS page:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System

(One cannot of course depend on any Wikipedia article, but if you don't know
much about ITS it's a good place to start; at the moment it's more-or-less as
I left it, when I worked on it.)

Later ITS had much more complex intercommunication tools. I remember one
(whose name I forget) where one's screen was divided into two (or more?)
parts, and what one typed appeared in one half, and the other person's typing
in the other half. No idea when that dates from, either, though.

	Noel



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