S.F. Bay Area Chapter's Symposium Concentrates on Software for Online Systems.

This article presents information related to the 5th Annual Symposium of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM. On October 29, 1965, the topic "Computers--Software for Online Systems," was discussed. Over 300 people attended this symposium which reflects the great interest in the topic. The papers given represented the broad interests in the time-sharing field of the diverse organizations from government, business and universities. The impact of online systems has been felt in each of these areas. The Octopus operating system for the Control Data 6600 is one of the first steps at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Livermore, California, to interconnect various types of computers and storage devices. This system provides a response within reasonable time to users located at remote teletypes. Up to 100 programs are known to the system at one time, of which ten are active and in main core. Programming the Octopus system has required two calendar-years and fifteen man-years.