If I remember correctly, multi-user computing as a public utility was one of the goals of the Multics[1] project in the 1960s. After Bell Labs dropped out of Mu

If I remember correctly, multi-user computing as a public utility was one of the goals of the Multics[1] project in the 1960s. After Bell Labs dropped out of Multics, some of the people working on Multics decided to take what they had learned and make a new operating system called Unix[2]. You might have heard of it. :) Public-access Unix machines still exist. There's SDF[3], and the various servers comprising the tildeverse[4]. But they're just a dim echo of what could have been. 1: https://www.multicians.org/fjcc1.html https://www.multicians.org/fjcc1.html 2: https://www.multicians.org/unix.html https://www.multicians.org/unix.html 3: https://sdf.org https://sdf.org 4: https://tildeverse.org/ https://tildeverse.org/