ITS: Difference between revisions

ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System) was developed by the MIT AI Lab in the late 1960s and is one of the first OSes of the original hacker culture. Nimble, small and optimized to within an inch of its life, ITS originally ran on the PDP-6 and was later ported to the PDP-10 mainframe. It employed many novel security features: it did not have any passwords at first, featured a command to allow users to purposely crash it (thus diminishing the fun of it) and allowed users to spy on and interfere with one another. MIT finally shut down its ITS machines in 1990 (an event that more-or-less ended their venerable hacker society); Sweden's Stacken Computer Club retired its installation, the last in the world, in 1995. ITS is still available for hobbyist use under emulators.