JOSS: a designer's view of an experimental on-line computing system

The JOHNNIAC Open-Shop System (JOSS) is an experimental, on-line, time-shared computing system which has been in daily use by staff members of The RAND Corporation since January 1964. It was designed to give the individual scientist or engineer an easy, direct way of solving his small numerical problems without a large investment in learning to use an operating system, a compiler, and debugging tools, or in explaining his problems to a professional computer programmer and in checking the latter's results. The ease and directness of JOSS is attributable to an interpretive routine in the JOHNNIAC computer which responds quickly to instructions expressed in a simple language and transmitted over telephone lines from convenient remote electric-typewriter consoles. An evaluation of the system has shown that in spite of severe constraints on speed and size of program, and the use of an aging machine of the vacuumtube era, JOSS provides a valuable service for computational needs which cannot be satisfied by conventional, closed-shop practice.