6 ms·

Michigan Terminal System

71 points by bilegeek 4y ago

anonymoose33282 4y ago
> MTS was used on a production basis at about 13 sites in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and possibly in Yugoslavia I’d love to hear a story about that last one
myself248 4y ago
Whoah! I knew Merit network was an early leader in educational computing access, and I've been in some of the former-mainframe rooms at MSU, but had no idea what was going on at UMich.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  Even more sophisticated was Dartmouth Time Sharing System <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System>. Unbelievable capabilities and userbase for 1988, let alone 1968!
  - bilegeek 4y ago
    Don't forget about the Berkeley Timesharing System[1], Compatible Time-Sharing System[2], or Livermore Timesharing System[3], and a shocking number more[4]. The wealth of diversity even in the late 60's was amazing. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Timesharing_System [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore_Time_Sharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore_Time_Sharing_System [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing#Notable_time-sharing_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing#Notable_time-shar...
    - TMWNN 4y ago
      I mentioned DTSS's userbase for a reason. Every single Dartmouth undergraduate student from 1968 onward wrote BASIC programs during a required mathematics class. Every Dartmouth student and faculty member was free to log into DTSS at any time from hundreds of terminals scattered around campus, plus hundreds more off campus at high schools and colleges in the northeast US. This drove an incredibly high usage for both school and fun among Dartmouth people (yes, including games). Nothing like this existed anywhere else on Earth in 1968, and was still rare 20 years later.
wpietri 4y ago
Interstingly, Larry Page went to U of M and used the Michigan Terminal System. One of its prominent characteristics was charging for everything. Say you'd log on, run the command to get into the forums. When logging off, it'd tell you how much your account had been charged for CPU time, storage time, etc. [1] Each student account was given a certain amount of funny money, and woe be unto you if you exceeded it. Research accounts were presumably funded through actual grant money. Reliable sources inform me that when Google was working on App Engine, Page took inspiration from MTS and would exhort engineers to follow its example. I am told that there was sometimes eye rolling. But when I look at my AWS and GCP bills now, it feels very familiar! [1] For more information, see the accounting sections here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfMichigan/mts/volumes/MTSVol01-TheMichiganTerminalSystem-Nov1991.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfMichigan/mts/volumes/MTSV...
- thewebcount 4y ago
  > One of its prominent characteristics was charging for everything. Say you'd log on, run the command to get into the forums. When logging off, it'd tell you how much your account had been charged for CPU time, storage time, etc. Yep, it sure did. I used it when I was there for my assembly language class. I remember my roommate used up his entire allotment of CPU time in one run where he accidentally had an infinite loop. (If I recall we were only allowed something like a few seconds of CPU time for the entire semester. It was typically all you needed.) He had a large print out about 50 pages long that said nothing but “The value of a is now 1,” over and over again. Luckily you could just tell the professor and he’d give you more time.
  - evilotto 4y ago
    I heard a legend at RPI that some students figured out just how big of a job they'd need to submit to underflow the MTS money variable and give themselves a balance of 2^24 or whatever size value it was actually using. IIRC, it was a line plotter job that would have (had they not cancelled it before actually printing and making the operators very sad, which is something you don't want to do) printed a solid black square the entire size of the paper.
  - 4y ago
ghshephard 4y ago
I remember using that at SFU from my undergrad days. The Computing Staff (well, the managers) got lazy and didn't want to move off of it way after it was obvious that its glory days were past, and one of Unix/Microsoft were the way of the future. They were all fired one day and the remaining staff were told to move the entire infrastructure (minus some of the stuff like payroll, administration) over to Unix by end of year. I spent far, far too much of my undergrad time on *forum, I don't think I've ever used a conferencing systems as seamless as that one.
rootbear 4y ago
When I first read about the MTS, and saw that it was used at Wayne State, I asked my friend if he remembered it from his time there in the 70s and he said he used it quite a bit and remembered it well.
msla 4y ago
https://try-mts.com/up-and-running-1-installation/ https://try-mts.com/up-and-running-1-installation/ Get MTS running on the Hercules emulator.
- krylon 4y ago
  Other than historical interest or nostalgia (for those who used it on real hardware), is there something of interest to find in it? I'm not being dismissive, just curious.
dangoor 4y ago
Funny to see this here now. Just a few days ago, I was telling someone about how the CS280 class I took in my first semester at UMich involved writing Pascal running on MTS. We started the semester with $20 of compute time in our accounts and it was possible to blow through all of that if you weren't careful about how you wrote your code.
- mega_dingus 4y ago
  And in 92, EECS280 made you do your first program in Pascal and then it was C for the rest of the curriculum. Lots of people were pissed they learned Pascal for one program.
  - dangoor 4y ago
    It wasn't Pascal on MTS in '92, right? I seem to remember my first year ('90) being the last for MTS in EECS280 (if not entirely). IIRC, we did one program in C at the end of the class but the rest were Pascal. Does seem like an odd choice to use two different languages in that class.
nix23 4y ago
[dead]
reidacdc 4y ago
I used to use this system in undergrad at the University of British Columbia, one of about ten or so installations. It was pretty cool at the time. I (dimly) recall it had something like output redirection, when you run your compiled executable, you can assign virtual devices ("PRINT" for the printer, e.g.) to various channels, and avoid storing files, which was constrained and costly. A few things I can't believe we lived with -- a flat file-space, and I think 8.3 file-names? It ran a lot of "standard" IBM OS/VS utilities, and I spent many happy hours in my summer internship squeezing a few extra milliseconds out of my FORTRAN-H executables.
- jdougan 4y ago
  SCARDS/INPUT, SPRINT/PRINT, SPUNCH/OBJECT, GUSER, 0...99 $ RUN *SYSPROG SCARDS=3FTJ:INPUT.DAT SPRINT=*VIRTDEV* I was at UBC from late '84 to around '90. One of the last to use unit-record equipment as the undergrad Mac Lab went in around summer '95. I had a lot of fun with the MTS command macro facility and wrote a (highly) simplified sh(1) that let me do redirections and "pipelines" with a mostly sh syntax. The part I miss is the system support for line oriented files and the tricks you could do with the command language to specify subsets of lines in a given file. FILE(1,8) will only include lines 1 through 8. The file system naming scheme was essentially 2 level: location(account/public/temporary/device), and the name (12 characters). Somewhere I have a *Forum log where they were contemplating adding a hierarchal filesystem with the sort of arguing you would expect. (hmmm...are you Andrew Reid?)
kjellsbells 4y ago
Used MTS at Durham University (UK) in the late 80s/ early 90s. I think the terminals were Lear Siegler ADM2s or something similarly old school. IIRC the real value of the environment was the forum software that allowed students to chat with one another.
PostOnce 4y ago
See also MAD / Michigan Algorithm Decoder whose ?? successor (MAD-SLIP) was the language ELIZA was written in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLIP_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLIP_(programming_language)

71 points by bilegeek 4y ago

> MTS was used on a production basis at about 13 sites in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and possibly in Yugoslavia I’d love to hear a story about that last one

myself248 4y ago

Whoah! I knew Merit network was an early leader in educational computing access, and I've been in some of the former-mainframe rooms at MSU, but had no idea what was going on at UMich.

TMWNN 4y ago
Even more sophisticated was Dartmouth Time Sharing System <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System>. Unbelievable capabilities and userbase for 1988, let alone 1968!
- bilegeek 4y ago
  Don't forget about the Berkeley Timesharing System[1], Compatible Time-Sharing System[2], or Livermore Timesharing System[3], and a shocking number more[4]. The wealth of diversity even in the late 60's was amazing. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Timesharing_System [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore_Time_Sharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore_Time_Sharing_System [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing#Notable_time-sharing_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing#Notable_time-shar...
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    I mentioned DTSS's userbase for a reason. Every single Dartmouth undergraduate student from 1968 onward wrote BASIC programs during a required mathematics class. Every Dartmouth student and faculty member was free to log into DTSS at any time from hundreds of terminals scattered around campus, plus hundreds more off campus at high schools and colleges in the northeast US. This drove an incredibly high usage for both school and fun among Dartmouth people (yes, including games). Nothing like this existed anywhere else on Earth in 1968, and was still rare 20 years later.

wpietri 4y ago

Interstingly, Larry Page went to U of M and used the Michigan Terminal System. One of its prominent characteristics was charging for everything. Say you'd log on, run the command to get into the forums. When logging off, it'd tell you how much your account had been charged for CPU time, storage time, etc. [1] Each student account was given a certain amount of funny money, and woe be unto you if you exceeded it. Research accounts were presumably funded through actual grant money. Reliable sources inform me that when Google was working on App Engine, Page took inspiration from MTS and would exhort engineers to follow its example. I am told that there was sometimes eye rolling. But when I look at my AWS and GCP bills now, it feels very familiar! [1] For more information, see the accounting sections here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfMichigan/mts/volumes/MTSVol01-TheMichiganTerminalSystem-Nov1991.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfMichigan/mts/volumes/MTSV...

thewebcount 4y ago
> One of its prominent characteristics was charging for everything. Say you'd log on, run the command to get into the forums. When logging off, it'd tell you how much your account had been charged for CPU time, storage time, etc. Yep, it sure did. I used it when I was there for my assembly language class. I remember my roommate used up his entire allotment of CPU time in one run where he accidentally had an infinite loop. (If I recall we were only allowed something like a few seconds of CPU time for the entire semester. It was typically all you needed.) He had a large print out about 50 pages long that said nothing but “The value of a is now 1,” over and over again. Luckily you could just tell the professor and he’d give you more time.
- evilotto 4y ago
  I heard a legend at RPI that some students figured out just how big of a job they'd need to submit to underflow the MTS money variable and give themselves a balance of 2^24 or whatever size value it was actually using. IIRC, it was a line plotter job that would have (had they not cancelled it before actually printing and making the operators very sad, which is something you don't want to do) printed a solid black square the entire size of the paper.
- 4y ago

ghshephard 4y ago

I remember using that at SFU from my undergrad days. The Computing Staff (well, the managers) got lazy and didn't want to move off of it way after it was obvious that its glory days were past, and one of Unix/Microsoft were the way of the future. They were all fired one day and the remaining staff were told to move the entire infrastructure (minus some of the stuff like payroll, administration) over to Unix by end of year. I spent far, far too much of my undergrad time on *forum, I don't think I've ever used a conferencing systems as seamless as that one.

rootbear 4y ago

When I first read about the MTS, and saw that it was used at Wayne State, I asked my friend if he remembered it from his time there in the 70s and he said he used it quite a bit and remembered it well.

msla 4y ago

https://try-mts.com/up-and-running-1-installation/ https://try-mts.com/up-and-running-1-installation/ Get MTS running on the Hercules emulator.

krylon 4y ago
Other than historical interest or nostalgia (for those who used it on real hardware), is there something of interest to find in it? I'm not being dismissive, just curious.

dangoor 4y ago

Funny to see this here now. Just a few days ago, I was telling someone about how the CS280 class I took in my first semester at UMich involved writing Pascal running on MTS. We started the semester with $20 of compute time in our accounts and it was possible to blow through all of that if you weren't careful about how you wrote your code.

mega_dingus 4y ago
And in 92, EECS280 made you do your first program in Pascal and then it was C for the rest of the curriculum. Lots of people were pissed they learned Pascal for one program.
- dangoor 4y ago
  It wasn't Pascal on MTS in '92, right? I seem to remember my first year ('90) being the last for MTS in EECS280 (if not entirely). IIRC, we did one program in C at the end of the class but the rest were Pascal. Does seem like an odd choice to use two different languages in that class.

nix23 4y ago

[dead]

reidacdc 4y ago

I used to use this system in undergrad at the University of British Columbia, one of about ten or so installations. It was pretty cool at the time. I (dimly) recall it had something like output redirection, when you run your compiled executable, you can assign virtual devices ("PRINT" for the printer, e.g.) to various channels, and avoid storing files, which was constrained and costly. A few things I can't believe we lived with -- a flat file-space, and I think 8.3 file-names? It ran a lot of "standard" IBM OS/VS utilities, and I spent many happy hours in my summer internship squeezing a few extra milliseconds out of my FORTRAN-H executables.

jdougan 4y ago
SCARDS/INPUT, SPRINT/PRINT, SPUNCH/OBJECT, GUSER, 0...99 $ RUN *SYSPROG SCARDS=3FTJ:INPUT.DAT SPRINT=*VIRTDEV* I was at UBC from late '84 to around '90. One of the last to use unit-record equipment as the undergrad Mac Lab went in around summer '95. I had a lot of fun with the MTS command macro facility and wrote a (highly) simplified sh(1) that let me do redirections and "pipelines" with a mostly sh syntax. The part I miss is the system support for line oriented files and the tricks you could do with the command language to specify subsets of lines in a given file. FILE(1,8) will only include lines 1 through 8. The file system naming scheme was essentially 2 level: location(account/public/temporary/device), and the name (12 characters). Somewhere I have a *Forum log where they were contemplating adding a hierarchal filesystem with the sort of arguing you would expect. (hmmm...are you Andrew Reid?)

kjellsbells 4y ago

Used MTS at Durham University (UK) in the late 80s/ early 90s. I think the terminals were Lear Siegler ADM2s or something similarly old school. IIRC the real value of the environment was the forum software that allowed students to chat with one another.

PostOnce 4y ago

See also MAD / Michigan Algorithm Decoder whose ?? successor (MAD-SLIP) was the language ELIZA was written in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLIP_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLIP_(programming_language)