Conversational Programming System or CPS was an early

Time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence ...

system offered by IBM which ran on

System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applic ...

mainframes A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

''circa'' 1967 through 1972 in a partition of OS/360 Release 17 MFT II or MVT or above. CPS was implemented as an interpreter, and users could select either a rudimentary form of

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

or a reasonably complete version of

PL/I PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language developed and published by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. It ...

. A third option provided remote job entry (RJE) features allowing users to submit JCL job streams for batch processing. A fourth option was called control mode. Normally, only the system operator would be permitted to use control mode. The available features in control mode included: *Send a message to an individual user or all users. *Clobber (today it would be called re-boot) a specific user's virtual CPS machine. *Monitor the activity of an individual user. *Terminate the entire CPS system. CPS provided a highly interactive user experience. It accomplished this by giving an immediate syntax error (when necessary) as soon as each line of a program was entered. CPS was also offered with a firmware-assisted interpreter, on the IBM System/360 Model 50, only, but few Model 50 installations elected to install this RPQ. This RPQ executed the ''EVAL'' function of CPS's programming stack using a firmware assist. The IBM-released version of CPS was designed to run on the IBM 1050 terminal and the

IBM 2741 The IBM 2741 is a printing computer terminal that was introduced in 1965. Compared to the teletypewriter machines that were commonly used as printing terminals at the time, the 2741 offers 50% higher speed, much higher quality printing, quieter o ...

terminal with the "break feature". User groups later added support for the IBM 2260 video display terminal. CPS support for the IBM 2741 "break feature" most likely influenced the eventual user group support for the "break feature" and the IBM 1050 terminal on IBM Administrative Terminal System (ATS/360), as many IBM customers which operated CPS also operated ATS/360. CPS was ultimately superseded by TSO. An IBM program product was offered which provided limited CPS functionality under TSO, intended mainly as a "bridge" between CPS and TSO.

References

External links

*
Conversational Programming System (CPS) development at computerhistory.org
{{Programming-software-stub IBM software Time-sharing