MUSIC/SP

MUSIC/SP (McGill University System for Interactive Computing) was developed at McGill University in the late 1960s from an IBM system called RAX (Remote Access). The system ran on IBM 360/370 mainframe hardware and offered novel features (for the time) such as file access control and data compression. It was designed to allow academics and students to create and run their programs interactively on terminals, in an era when most mainframe computing was still being done from cards. Over the years, development continued and the system evolved to embrace e-mail, the internet and eventually the WWW. At its peak in the late 1980s, there were over 250 universities and colleges that used the system in North and South America, Europe and Asia.