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Development of operating systems
Further work was required of the operating system with the advent of interactive computing, in which the user enters commands directly at a terminal and waits for the system to respond. Processes known as terminal handlers were added to the system, along with mechanisms like interrupts (to get the attention of the operating system to handle urgent tasks) and buffers (for temporary storage of...
Time-sharing from Project MAC to UNIX
...United States independently described something they called time-sharing. Meanwhile, computer pioneer J.C.R. Licklider at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began to promote the idea of interactive computing as an alternative to batch processing. Batch processing was the normal mode of operating computers at the time: a user handed a deck of punched cards to an operator, who fed...