

Michigan Terminal System Archive - emersonrsantos
http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org

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ghshephard
I spent 3/4 of my Undergraduate life on MTS, and _Forum was basic the social
hub of a large chunk of nerdy students (myself included). The fact that that
MTS VT100 and IBM terminals were all over the place (Literally Terminals -
great, big 20 pound CRT monstrosities that had been in place for 10+ years) -
meant you could login for just a few minutes anywhere on campus - kind of a
precursor to todays mobility (as long as you were on campus).

Being able to print your big 500 page print job on the Central Laser Printer,
and having it wait for you in your output box (I was XGEC), was also pretty
awesome - and it provided 24x7 jobs for the people working in the Computing
Center.

It's kind of a shame that I never really used/learned the system the same way
I did with Unix - I really treated it like a large BBS environment, that I
could also do some programming homework on.

But, time moved on, and by 1992/1993, MTS was starting to show it's age, and
our researchers and faculty were becoming increasingly annoyed at the "IT
Managers" who literally refused to take direction - as though the system was
run for _their* benefit, instead of the campus benefit.

So, in a day remembered as Bloody Tuesday at SFU - the _entire_ Sr. Management
team was publicly terminated, and the remaining employees were told they had
exactly one year to replace all of the MTS (and IBM 3090 (3081?) system with
Unix systems and NFS file storage.

One year later, we entered the brave world of Unix - which, while I have fond
memories of MTS, was a far, far better system to prepare undergraduates for
the world that awaited them.

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ajarmst
I used the MTS system at the University of Alberta as an Engineering
undergraduate in the 1980s. At the beginning of the year, you were budgeted a
certain number of CPU seconds which you couldn't exceed. We were VERY careful
about not accidentally coding infinite loops. There was a room full of VT100
terminals that we used, but if you needed hard copy, you had to trudge across
campus to the building where the burst printer lived.

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brohoolio
Pretty legendary system at the University of Michigan. The old timers still
talk about all the time.

~~~
colomon
Hmm, as I recall, about half of my programming classes required me to write
programs to run on MTS. 'Course, we studied IBM mainframe assembly language in
one class...

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Animats
MTS is historically very important. The original version, for the IBM 360/67,
was the first OS to support virtual machines. The 360/67 was the first machine
with protection hardware to support a hypervisor. All IBM S/370s and later got
that hardware because MTS proved its usefulness.

IBM got hypervisors right. You could run another copy of the OS under itself.
The virtual machine looks just like the real machine to a program. And yes, it
nests; VM under VM under VM... is possible.

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notacoward
I have fond memories of MTS. While it was clunky in many ways, it was
generally adequate and occasionally turned out to have features more advanced
than contemporaries. For example, the ability to limit access to a file by
"program key" (PKEY) as well as by user/project was a far superior alternative
to setuid. (I learned about this in 1985 or so; not sure when the feature
appeared.)

Ah, the good old days. Perusing the previous user's history on an Ontel
terminal, chatting through MERIT concentrators, and good old MTS. I don't miss
the punch cards of my first year, though.

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JeffOgden
You can run MTS yourself today using Hercules under Windows, Mac OS X, or
Unix. See: [http://archive.michigan-terminal-
system.org/](http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/)

