Data communication services, for performing transmission and information processing by directly linking communication lines with information processing equipment, were authorized (in May 1966 and August 1967) as public telecommunications services by the then Ministry of Postal Services. This became an opportunity for research and development on data communications services with the goal of "integrating communication and processing", and the Electrical Communication Laboratories of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation planned the DIPS-0 Project (modifying the Hitachi HITAC-8400 to a multiprocessor configuration). The aim of this project was the early achievement of a joint usage system based on time-sharing systems (TSS) and, in particular, the use of this system to quickly patch software problems. This project conducted TSS joint usage experiments and ended in October 1968.
This was the first step in the DIPS Project, and Sekiguchi Yoshio reflected on it as follows: "The Japan-wide deployment of a variety of data communication services has quickly become a reality. However, to achieve this, it was necessary to have standardized computers with high processing capacity. This was done to control development costs by standardizing architecture and enabling standardized programming. The DIPS-1 was a standard system from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, designed to achieve this." (Source: "A History of NTT R&D")
(*) DIPS: Dendenkosha Information Processing System
