I have some collected links
REMINISCENCES ON THE HISTORY OF TIME SHARING
John McCarthy, Stanford University 1983 Winter or Spring
I remember thinking about time-sharing about the time of my first contact with computers and being surprised that this wasn’t the goal of IBM and all the other manufacturers and users of computers. This might have been around 1955.
…
My 1959 memo advertised that users generally would get the advantage of on-line debugging. However, it said nothing about how many terminals would be required and where they would be located. I believe I imagined them to be numerous and in the users’ offices, but I cannot be sure. Referring to an “exchange” suggests that I had in mind many terminals. I cannot now imagine what the effect was on the reader of my failure to be explicit about this point. I’m afraid I was trying to minimize the difficulty of the project.The major technical error of my 1959 ideas was an underestimation of the computer capacity required for time-sharing. I still don’t understand where all the computer time goes in time-sharing installations, and neither does anyone else.
MEMORANDUM TO P. M. MORSE PROPOSING TIME SHARING
John McCarthy, Stanford University January 1, l959
Computers were originally developed with the idea that programs would be written to solve general classes of problems and that after an initial period most of the computer time would be spent in running these standard programs with new sets of data. This view completely underestimated the variety of uses to which computers would be put. The actual situation is much closer to the opposite extreme, wherein each user of the machine has to write his own program and that once this program is debugged, one run solves the problem. This means that the time required to solve the problem consists mainly of time required to debug the program
…
The only way quick response can be provided at a bearable cost is by time-sharing. That is, the computer must attend to other customers while one customer is reacting to some output.
And a video, 27 mins, 1963
1963 Timesharing: A Solution to Computer Bottlenecks
Some reference links from Gunkies wiki: