timesharing:

here we will examine an interesting puzzle within the larger puzzle, and though there is no neat and tidy conclusion to be drawn just yet it has been bothering me since utility computing came up and i think it is worth documenting here.

as mentioned in the thread on 'cloud', the state of computing in the 1950s and 60s was such that computing resources were centralized in large mainframes and accessed in a slow card-based batch system

the solution to this problem was to develop methods of 'time sharing', where users could access these central resources via 'dumb' terminals and the central computer could queue up the processing requests of many users fluidly

during the 60s several of these systems were developed and commercialized, including the notable and influential effort Project MAC and its multics operating system.