This Day in History
Clifford Shaw
November 7, 1960
RAND's JOSS Operating System Begins
The JOSS conversational timesharing service begins on the Rand Corporation’s Johnniac computer. Mathematician Cliff Shaw developed the Johnniac Open Shop System (JOSS) to bring users back into contact with the machine to do online debugging and program development. Before timesharing was created, batch turn-around times impeded the solution of many problems as programmers ('coders') submitted punch cards to computer operators and waited for their results—sometimes for days.