Incompatible Timesharing System Bibliography

I’m really surprised that there hasn’t been more work done on the technology that was created by those legendary hackers at the AI Lab. The Incompatible Timesharing System is perhaps their most significant accomplishment, but very little that has been written about it (and nothing, to my knowledge, by STS people). There’s Levy’s Hackers, of course, but I’ve lately come to see his formulation of the “Hacker ethic” as very misleading; the hackers didn’t express themselves the way Levy does. The hackers expressed themselves much more lucidly by means of technology, and ITS is their most coherent statement.Bryan 12:36, November 22, 2005 (EST)

Chiou, S; Music, C.; Sprague, K.;Wahba, R. (2001) “A Marriage of Convenience: The Founding of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.Unpublished mss. Retrieved November 10, 2005. This paper was prepared by four students in David Mindell’s Structure of Engineering Revolutions class, and it’s outstanding. The text is 40 pages, and it’s based on extensive interviews. Required reading.Bryan 12:36, November 22, 2005 (EST)

Eastlake, D.E. (1972) ITS Status Report. Massachusetts Institute of Technology A.I. Laboratory, Artificial Intelligence Memo No. 238.This is the only official report ever produced on ITS, I believe. During the same period, there are dozens of reports and publications on the AI lab software the lab created. The Lab was trying to differentiate itself from Project MAC, where they were studying how to make a timesharing operating system; the AI Lab people wanted to USE a timesharing operating system and actually get some work done. I think it’s ironic that most of the AI software they produced is now considered a curiousity, while ITS has had much more influence than most people realize. Bryan 12:36, November 22, 2005 (EST)

Lin, Yuwei (2004). “Epistemologically Multiple Actor-Centered Systems: or, EMACS At Work!.” Ubiquity 5(1).

MIT AI Lab (n.d.). “Tourist Policy and Rules for Tourist Use of Its Machines.”

Stallman, R. (1986). “Lecture at KTH.” Unpublished mss. I think that, among programmers and hackers, this is Stallman’s best known speech. He discusses ITS at length. I’ve double-checked (as far as possible) all of the claims he makes about ITS in this speech — they’re accurate. Bryan 12:36, November 22, 2005 (EST)”

Steele, G.L.; Gabriel, R.P. (1996). “The Evolution of Lisp.” In History of Programming languages—II, T. J. Bergin and R. G. Gibson, Eds. ACM Press, New York, NY, 233-330.