This volume describes General Electric Corporation’s venture into developing second and third generation mainframe computer systems. The General Electric Corporation (GE), which began its life as the Edison Electric Co., was long involved in electrical appliances and industrial machines. It was also a founder of the Radio Corporation of America, which eventually became one of its competitors, and developed many electrical systems in order to control different types of industrial machines. Its breakthrough into computing came with its winning bid to provide the computing systems for the Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) system developed for the Bank of America by the Stanford Research Institute. The success of this project led GE to develop the GE-200 series which was the foundation for commercial timesharing. The GE-235 was selected by Dartmouth for its Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), an innovative academic time-sharing system. BASIC was developed on the GE-235 computer system under DTSS. GE enhanced it to develop its Mark II/III Time Sharing System, apparently the first commercial time sharing service in the world. GE develop the GE-300/-400 systems for industrial process control. The GE-600 series replaced the GE-200 series and demonstrated innovation in time-sharing systems. The GE-645 was selected to host Multics, which was developed by MIT. However, GE felt that it could not compete in computing against IBM, Univac, and other mainframes competitors, so it folded its tent and sold its Computer Division to Honeywell, Inc. Nevertheless, GE will be remembered for many innovations which continue to be used in modern computing systems.

Some of the aspects of the operation of time-shared, interactive computer systems are analyzed. The emphasis is on the reaction of hardware systems to the demands that its users make upon it. Simply stated, the problem is to characterize both time-shared systems and their users in order to be able to predict the performance of the two operating together. Portions of this problem include the specification and measurement of user characteristics, the development and verification of both simulation and mathematical models for time-shared systems, and the specification and measurement of performance matrics for such systems. The user and some of the performance measurements were made on Project MAC's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). (Author).

An experimental time-shared computer system has been used to control and collect data from a Hall effect experiment. In addition to selection of the voltage sequence and control of specimen current and magnetic flux directions, the computer exerts positive control over the specimen temperature in accordance with a series of thermocouple voltages entered by the operator at the beginning of the run. The interface circuitry is constructed from four general purpose modules and a single special purpose unit. Details of the interface system and the programs used to control the experiment and to perform intermediate calculations are given. It was found that the time-shared system was well-suited to control an experiment of this type. The demands on the computer were essentially similar to those required by a human user interacting in a conversational mode. Substantial savings in time over manual data collection and reduction were realized; a temperature run with 38 to 40 data points between 10 and 320 K could be completed in less than 4 hours.

Computer Programming and Computer Systems imparts a "reading knowledge of computer systems. This book describes the aspects of machine-language programming, monitor systems, computer hardware, and advanced programming that every thorough programmer should be acquainted with. This text discusses the automatic electronic digital computers, symbolic language, Reverse Polish Notation, and Fortran into assembly language. The routine for reading blocked tapes, dimension statements in subroutines, general-purpose input routine, and efficient use of memory are also elaborated. This publication is intended as an introduction to modern programming practices for professional programmers, but is also valuable to research workers in science, engineering, academic, and industrial fields who are using computers.

Written with computer scientists and engineers in mind, this book brings queueing theory decisively back to computer science.