Allen-Babcock Computing was founded in Los Angeles in 1964 by James D. Babcock and Michael Jane Allen Babcock to take advantage of the fast-growing market for computer

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...

services. In 1966 the company developed "RUSH" (Remote Users of Shared Hardware), an interactive dialect of

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

. Between 1965 and 1966 they assisted in the development of

Conversational Programming System Conversational Programming System or CPS is an early Time-sharing system offered by IBM which runs on System/360 mainframe computer, mainframes ''circa'' 1967 through 1972 in a partition of OS/360 Release 17 MFT II or MVT or above. CPS is imple ...

(CPS), a timesharing system that ran under

OS/360 OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB a ...

, under contract to

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

. CPS was a subset of RUSH prepared by IBM with the permission of Allen-Babcock. The significant technological outcome was the first idea to alter the hardware of an IBM computer to enhance the performance of a time-sharing system on IBM hardware. This was the first time such

firmware In computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, h ...

was programmed by software developers for this purpose. Later tests showed increases of throughput by as much as 70%. Several such altered

360 Model 50 36 may refer to: * 36 (number) * 36 BC * AD 36 * 1936 * 2036 Science * Krypton, a noble gas in the periodic table * 36 Atalante, an asteroid in the asteroid belt Arts and entertainment * ''36'' (TV series), an American sports documentary show ...

s were delivered to other IBM customers. In 1969 Allen-Babcock held a 3 percent share of the time-sharing services market. During the early 70's Allen-Babcock leased copies of the RUSH software to several industry owners of the IBM 360 series computer systems. One such company was

Procter & Gamble The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) is an American multinational consumer goods corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. It specializes in a wide range of personal health/con ...

. These lessees sought to use RUSH internally to provide their companies access to time sharing on their Internet networks. In 1975 Allen-Babcock was acquired by

Tymshare Tymshare, Inc was a time-sharing service and third-party hardware maintenance company. Competing with companies such as CompuServe, Service Bureau Corporation and National CSS. Tymshare developed and acquired various technologies, such as data ...

Notes

References

* * * * {{Citation , last=Rosin , first=Robert , periodical=PL/I Bulletin , issue=7 , title=PL/I Implementation Survey , pages=35–42 , year=1969 Defunct companies based in Greater Los Angeles Time-sharing companies Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies