Experience gained in the development and use of TSS

Six and a half years have elapsed since W. T. Comfort described TSS/360 to the 1965 Fall Joint Computer Conference. Since that time, much has been learned by IBM and its customers about time-sharing, about TSS, and about large-scale, interactive systems in general. Scores of people have worked with the system; dozens of articles have been published; it would clearly be impossible to put in one paper a comprehensive answer to the question---what has been learned developing TSS? Yet, with the availability of Release 8.1, the major development work on the system has been completed, and this is an appropriate time to take stock of where we have been, where we are, and where we might go from here.