What Happened on November 7th

The Johnniac Open Shop System (JOSS) conversational timesharing service begins on the Rand Corporation’s Johnniac computer. Mathematician Cliff Shaw developed 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.