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By time-sharing, does he mean sharing computing time on a cluster? I work on my university's cluster and on bad days, my jobs are queued for 4 hours and then run for 20 minutes...

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Dude, you didn't even look at the pdf did you. That was the entry for 13 Mar 1978

I'm pretty sure clusters changed in their architecture and their processing power, but you still have to stand in line

In 1978 Time Sharing Machines refers to single machines with multi-tasking. ex. the terminal you are using right now. So you don't have to "wait in line" you have to share resources. Just like your web-browser shares resources with your editor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing

esr also has a good article: http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/timesharing.html

I didn't know time sharing was still a thing.

Yeah for clusters/super computers...I mean you'd think more than one person wants to use them right?

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