[HN Gopher] Michigan Terminal System
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Michigan Terminal System
Author : bilegeek
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-03-11 19:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| msla wrote:
| https://try-mts.com/up-and-running-1-installation/
|
| Get MTS running on the Hercules emulator.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Even more sophisticated was Dartmouth Time Sharing System
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System>.
| Unbelievable capabilities _and_ userbase for 1988, let alone
| 1968!
| bilegeek wrote:
| 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
|
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-
| Sharing_System
|
| [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore_Time_Sharing_Syste
| m
|
| [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing#Notable_time-
| shar...
| TMWNN wrote:
| 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.
| dangoor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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/MTSV...
| msla wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'm pretty sure this was fairly common on school mainframes of
| the era.
|
| > Each student account was given a certain amount of funny
| money, and woe be unto you if you exceeded it.
|
| This kind of thing forms part of the founding story of Project
| Gutenberg:
|
| > Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given
| an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it
| by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the
| Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.
|
| > This was totally serendipitous, as it turned out that two of
| a four operator crew happened to be the best friend of
| Michael's and the best friend of his brother. Michael just
| happened "to be at the right place at the right time" at the
| time there was more computer time than people knew what to do
| with, and those operators were encouraged to do whatever they
| wanted with that fortune in "spare time" in the hopes they
| would learn more for their job proficiency.
|
| > At any rate, Michael decided there was nothing he could do,
| in the way of "normal computing," that would repay the huge
| value of the computer time he had been given ... so he had to
| create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An
| hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value
| created by computers would not be computing, but would be the
| storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our
| libraries.
|
| > He then proceeded to type in the "Declaration of
| Independence" and tried to send it to everyone on the networks
| ... which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss
| at creating an early version of what was later called the
| "Internet Virus."
|
| > A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of
| a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born
| as Michael stated that he had "earned" the $100,000,000 because
| a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be
| an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000
| of the computer users of the future.
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...
| thewebcount wrote:
| > 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.
| ghshephard wrote:
| 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.
| reidacdc wrote:
| 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.
| rootbear wrote:
| 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.
| nix23 wrote:
| [dead]
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(page generated 2023-03-12 23:01 UTC)