ITS, Eliza & MiT's AI Lab - Computerphile

You're going to talk a bit about ITS. What what is ITS, and you know, where's it come from? >> Right. I'd like to explain how ITS came to be.

Uh we can go kind of back to the late '50s with John McCarthy then at MIT. He kind of invented or uh uh pioneered the concepts of artificial intelligence and time sharing and Lisp.

So, some people picked up up on the time sharing thing. And they started an experiment called CTSS, the compatible time sharing system.

Because it was running on IBM computers and it was compatible with their batch software. Uh and the experiment was considered a success.

So, they start up a new project called project Multics for creating kind of a time sharing utility.

They kind of envision that this would be the the way people all over all over the country would use computers in the future.

Um and they took themselves very seriously. They were planning this for several years. Uh there was a kind of a academic feel to it.

Uh and it's kind of these days mostly famous for being part of the Unix history. >> And prior to that, what would happen?

You'd have an operator who would feed programs in one at a time. >> Right. Right. You would bring a batch of punch cards to an operator, which would feed them into computer, and maybe next day they would get a listing of the results or so. So, that's that was very clunky, so that's why they wanted time sharing instead.

Well, some other people they picked up on the AI stuff. And they wanted to do AI research. And they were using this CTSS system a bit, but they thought it was a little slow and clunky and not very responsive.

So they got their own computer, a PDP-6 instead. So a lot of the early AI work was on of that but just as a single user system, so only one person at a time could use computer.

So after a couple of years of that uh they figured they would need a time-sharing system. But they they still wanted this uh uh highly interactive responsive system as opposed to CTSS.