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Project Genie pioneered several computer hardware techniques, such as being the first commercial time-sharing system which allowed end-user programming in machine language. Project Genie also pioneered the use of separated protected user modes, memory paging, and protected memory. Concepts from Project Genie influenced the development of the TENEX operating system for the PDP-10 and Unix (Unix co-creator Ken Thompson worked on an SDS 940 while at Berkeley). The SDS 940 mainframe would be used as the hardware for Douglas Engelbart's OnLine System at the Stanford Research Institute. The SRI SDS 940 would later be used as the first computer used by The Community Memory Project in Berkeley.
The system that XDS (then SDS) would call the 940 was created by modifying an SDS 930 24-bit commercial computer so that it could be used for timesharing. The work was funded by ARPA and directed by the late Dr. Mel Pirtle at and Dr. Wayne Lichtenberger at UC Berkeley. Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and L. Peter Deutsch were among the young technical leaders of that project. When completed and in service, the first 940 ran reliably in spite of its array of hairy mechanical peripherals such as a hugh disk drive driven by hydraulic arms! It served about forty or fifty users at a time, and also drove a graphics subsystem that was quite capable for its time.
When SDS realized the value of the time sharing system, and that the software was in the public domain, they came back to Berkeley and collected enough information to begin manufacturing. Because the SDS/XDS engineers did not understand the hardware modifications well, 940s were manufactured by building 930s and then revising them exactly as the Berkeley engineers had done to make a 940.
Members of the project left UCB to form the Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC), which produced one prototype, the BCC-500. When the company went bankrupt, the BCC-500 was transferred to the University of Hawaii, who continued to use it though the 1970s.
Several BCC employees became the core of Xerox PARC's computer research group (Deutsch, Lampson and Thacker) in 1970Events January events January 1 Construction begins on Arcosanti, by Paolo Soleri, in Mayer, Arizona, located 65, miles north of Phoenix, Arizona. January 1 Unix epoch at 00:00:00 UTC. January 12 Biafra capitulates, ending the Nigerian civil war. January. Dr. Lichtenberger went to the University of Hawaii, and Dr. Pirtle became technical director for the ILLIAC IV project at NASA Ames Research Center.
See also: DARPA, CaliforniaCalifornia is a state located in the western United States, bordering the Pacific Ocean. The most populous and third largest state in the U. California is both physically and demographically diverse. The state's official nickname is "The Golden State", wh, computer scienceIn its most general sense, computer science CS or compsci is the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. Introduction Computer science encomposses a variety of topics relating to computation, ranging from abstrac