Students who worked on the Berkeley Timesharing System included undergraduates Chuck Thacker and L. Peter Deutsch and doctoral student Butler Lampson.[2]
The heart of the system was the Monitor (roughly what is now usually called a kernel) and the
Executive (roughly what is now usually called a command-line interface).[3]
When the system was working, Max Palevsky, founder of Scientific Data Systems, was at first not interested in selling it as a product. He thought timesharing had no commercial demand. However, as other customers expressed interest, it was put on the SDS pricelist as an expensive variant of the 930.[4]
By November 1967 it was being sold commercially as the SDS 940.[5]
By August 1968 a version 2.0 was announced that was just called the "SDS 940 Time-Sharing System".[3]
Other timesharing systems were generally one-of-a-kind systems, or limited to a single application (such as teaching Dartmouth BASIC). The 940 was the first to allow for general-purpose programming, and sold about 60 units: not large by today's standards, but it was a significant part of SDS' revenues.[4]
Some concepts of the operating system also influenced the design of Unix, whose designer Ken Thompson worked on the SDS 940 while at Berkeley.
The QEDtext editor was first implemented by Butler Lampson and L. Peter Deutsch for the Berkeley Timesharing System in 1967.[7]
Another major customer was Tymshare, who used the system to become the USA's best known commercial timesharing service in the late 1960s. By 1972, Tymshare alone had 23 systems in operation.[8]