Economic Perspectives on the History of the Computer Time-Sharing Industry, 1965-1985.

The article describes how the time-sharing industry constituted a major sector of the computer services industry in the U.S. Time-sharing developed in the mainframe era where a system was consisted of a large central computer to which many terminals were connected. Its market was existed because time-sharing was only means of providing a personal computing experience at a reasonable cost. It is noted that the Compatible Time Sharing System, the first experimental time-sharing system, was demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).