DTSS was originally written by students at Dartmouth College and emphasised ease of use and interactivity, which were important factors in its later widespread adoption. Another influence in its acceptance was that to the user it appeared to be integrated into the programming language being used at the time. These languages were the well-known FORTRAN and ALGOL-60 (Caroline Era) and a third little-known language known as BASIC. It was first used in 1964 on the Dartmouth mainframe. Later, it was updated several times.