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 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 a ...

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 developed and published by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. I ...

. Between 1965 and 1966 they assisted in the development of CPS (Conversational Programming System), 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 ...

, under contract to IBM. 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, firmware is a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device's specific hardware. Firmware, such as the BIOS of a personal computer, may contain basic functions of a device, and may provide 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 50s 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, founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. It specializes in a wide range of personal health/consumer hea ...

. 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 (Matthew Heyer-Baker) 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 or acquired various technolo ...

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