X – JOSS Session

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses JOSS session. The JOHNNIAC open shop system (JOSS) was conceived in early November 1960 at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. RAND had always been a pioneer in computing, with a long history of innovative research in both hardware and software, and continuing this tradition was certainly a strong motivation for the JOSS project. However, the single most important factor was the continuing presence of JOHNNIAC. The RAND JOHNNIAC was basically a computer of the Princeton class, following the original logical design of the group at the Institute for Advanced Study, under the direction of mathematician John von Neumann. Other IAS machines included the ORACLE at Oak Ridge, the MANIAC at Los Alamos, and the ILLIAC at Illinois. JOSS is a complete, self-contained system, acting as a single active agent. That is, the JOSS user is always communicating with a single set of software that always recognizes the same message in the same way, and there are no modes or internal states of which the user must be aware. Similarly, a message to JOSS is never passed off to another processing system to determine its nature and content. JOSS machine hardware and software are completely sealed off, in that their nature cannot be detected by the user. JOSS is independent of its implementation and, at least in theory, can be programmed for any computer with the requisite facility for handling typewriter terminals.