A programming environment for a timeshared system

In 1968 the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory began to construct a programming environment from a PDP-10, a pre-TOPS-10 DEC 1 timesharing system, and some innovative terminal hardware. By now this has developed into a programming environment for a KL-10 that integrates our editor with various other system functions, especially the Lisp subsystem. We use the term 'SAIL' to refer to the Stanford A. I. Lab KL-10 computer running the WAITS timesharing system. [Harvey 1982] By 'programming environment' we mean the mechanisms that allow a user to type text at his program or subsystem, and which manage output text. 2 We are talking about mechanical management of the interaction between user and program, not about any intelligent mediation. A good programming environment should be flexible enough to suit individuals, yet without requiring the mechanics of interaction to be re-learned for each new program. In this paper we describe our programming environment, what makes it unique, and why we think that it is not necessary to move to personal computers for a very usable programming environment.