There have been a few references to MTS over the past couple of months
that led me to suspect people are running it under Hercules. I did some
poking around a while back and managed to find some tape images (bitsaver,
I think), and did some cursory reading of the release notes.
I think there might be enough there to IPL and perform a basic
installation, but what immediately caught my attention was the mention
that sites had to purchase ASMH from IBM, which leads me to believe the
public distributions don't contain an assembler.
I cut my teeth on *real* computers on the U of Alberta's Amdahl running
MTS, and I can't possibly imagine using it without an assembler. So my
first question is: is anyone running MTS under Hercules from these public
images? And if yes, question 2 is: which languages are included?
One of the main reasons I would like to get MTS running would be to play
around with the scheduler code. I remember some changes that were
introduced circa 1981 that - I thought - destroyed the interactive
response time of the system. E.g. APL went from being a joy to
practically un-usable, IMO. I've always wanted to poke around in there
and see if I couldn't fix it.
And to get thoroughly esoteric and obscure, what are the odds that someone
out there squirreled away an archive of SHOW:? from UQV-MTS?
--lyndon