10 Aug
2015
10 Aug
'15
4:24 p.m.
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
10 Aug
10 Aug
4:35 p.m.
The UMich guys have made available images of tapes from many MTS
releases. Not all releases are complete. They've also provided a built
system of D6.0 (1986? -87?) with all the further changes it was running
just before shutdown in the 90s. (No tape images for this version yet.)
You may want to look at:
http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/
ASMH is a licensed program product, so they can't make it available.
MTS used a fairly heavily modified version of it. A lot of other
languages are included, though. There's a list on the above web site
somewhere of the license status of many things.
Source is included in the tapes. If the SHOW bits to which you refer
were shared amongst the consortium, and predate the release of D6.0,
they're quite likely in there somewhere. IIRC the copy of the MTS
manuals on bitsavers were actually freshly generated in the last few
years, so the thing might be referenced there.
De
4:49 p.m.
Dennis is correct, the MTS source and binary tapes were released to the
public a few years back and the URL he quotes is the hub for everything
MTS. If you want to spin up an instance yourself from scratch, I wrote a
little tutorial some time ago that will distill down the installation
documentation for you, and notes a few potential snags:
http://wildflower.diablonet.net/~scaron/herculesmts.html
It's actually pretty easy to install and run MTS from scratch, in rather
stark contrast to many operating systems that ran on the 360/370 platform.
There are a wide variety of assemblers and compilers included; here's an
overview; just a few of them are broken (Pascal, C) but most run:
http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/discussions/programming-languag…
Have fun! MTS runs great on Hercules. I have an instance running pretty
much continuously on one of my servers and I'm always on there playing
around with old languages.
Best,
Sean
On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 4:35 PM, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> wrote:
The UMich guys have made available images of tapes
from many MTS
releases. Not all releases are complete. They've also provided a built
system of D6.0 (1986? -87?) with all the further changes it was running
just before shutdown in the 90s. (No tape images for this version yet.)
You may want to look at:
http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/
ASMH is a licensed program product, so they can't make it available.
MTS used a fairly heavily modified version of it. A lot of other
languages are included, though. There's a list on the above web site
somewhere of the license status of many things.
Source is included in the tapes. If the SHOW bits to which you refer
were shared amongst the consortium, and predate the release of D6.0,
they're quite likely in there somewhere. IIRC the copy of the MTS
manuals on bitsavers were actually freshly generated in the last few
years, so the thing might be referenced there.
De
5:13 p.m.
You may want to look at:
http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/
By sheer coincidence, I happened across that site this morning. Very
useful!
Source is included in the tapes. If the SHOW bits to
which you refer
were shared amongst the consortium, and predate the release of D6.0,
they're quite likely in there somewhere.
SHOW was Keith Fenske's personal account at the UofA. It hosted the most
astounding collection of games and other nifty bric-a-brac. His version
of Space War (for the 3270) probably sucked down more student CPU soft
dollars than all their combined course work did!)
--lyndon
6:01 p.m.
--On August 10, 2015 at 2:13:56 PM -0700 Lyndon Nerenberg
<lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:
Unless someone at UQV archived those files, they are probably gone.
I'm quite sure they aren't on any tapes from Michigan that were saved.
Mike
Source is
included in the tapes. If the SHOW bits to which you refer
were shared amongst the consortium, and predate the release of D6.0,
they're quite likely in there somewhere.
SHOW was Keith Fenske's personal account at the UofA. It hosted the
most astounding collection of games and other nifty bric-a-brac. His
version of Space War (for the 3270) probably sucked down more student
CPU soft dollars than all their combined course work did!)
4:43 p.m.
On 8/10/2015 1:24 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
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
Lyndon,
there is a Yahoo group, H390-MTS at yahoogroups.com which I archive and is
active which deals with MTS, assuming that it is the same mainframe system.
I didn't see that you had posted to any of the yahoogroups Hercules
groups, and you may be lurking, but wanted to mention them. I can post
all of the hercules groups or send them offline if you need.
thanks
Jim
5:16 p.m.
I didn't see that you had posted to any of the
yahoogroups Hercules groups,
and you may be lurking, but wanted to mention them. I can post all of the
hercules groups or send them offline if you need.
I'm aware of them, and have scanned a couple of the groups (how I found
pointers to the VM six-pack).
But the Yahoo Groups interface is so repulsive as to be unusable (by me,
anyway).
--lyndon
5:26 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Lyndon
Nerenberg
Sent: 10 August 2015 22:16
To: jwsmail at jwsss.com; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: MTS
Just sign up for e-mail. But if you want to use MTS the best way to get
support from the MTS guys is via Yahoo...
I didn't see that you had posted to any of
the yahoogroups Hercules
groups, and you may be lurking, but wanted to mention them. I can
post all of the hercules groups or send them offline if you need.
I'm aware of them, and have scanned a couple of the groups (how I found
pointers to the VM six-pack).
But the Yahoo Groups interface is so repulsive as to be unusable (by me,
anyway).
--lyndon
6:43 p.m.
On 8/10/2015 2:16 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
They have the MTS system working, and you can peruse the group messages
w/o joining via their web, just google h390-mts and go to that link.
If you want anything in the file section, you will have to join, or feel
free to message me and I'll retrieve it. Looks like manuals, and
patches are available there, don't know if they are archived elsewhere.
I've not searched to see who is hosting the system, you will have to
read for yourself.
If you can read the cctalk archive online, you can read the MTS group
message archive online. I subscribe to many groups and archive them all
via email and use that resource personally, but if you have not
subscribed since the inception of the group, you will of course have
missed a lot.
Several of the authors of MTS are participating, and you are denying
yourself a resource that is very valuable, but whatever.
thanks
Jim
I didn't
see that you had posted to any of the yahoogroups Hercules
groups, and you may be lurking, but wanted to mention them. I can
post all of the hercules groups or send them offline if you need.
I'm aware of them, and have scanned a couple of the groups (how I
found pointers to the VM six-pack).
But the Yahoo Groups interface is so repulsive as to be unusable (by
me, anyway).
--lyndon
5:04 p.m.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 01:24:41PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
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 assume you're saying that the real MTS sites bought *ASMH back in the
old days, not that it's possible for mere mortals to buy a license for
home emulator use nowadays at a finite price?
I'd love to be wrong (and I'd gladly pay four digits, as long as it's
one-time and not per-year). It'd be hard to get very far w/o *ASMH
(it's horrible but it's the standard, and MTS had plenty of languages
I miss less), and writing a clean/legal reimplementaation now would only
take, say, 5000 person-years.
John Wilson
USERHA8G at RPITSMTS.Bitnet
5:13 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of John
Wilson
Sent: 10 August 2015 22:05
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: MTS
On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 01:24:41PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
old
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 assume you're saying that the real MTS sites bought *ASMH back in the days, not that it's possible for mere mortals to
buy a license for home
emulator use nowadays at a finite price?
That is correct, they bought Assembler H. There are Assembler H compatible
alternatives such as:-
http://tachyonsoft.com/
and even
http://z390.org/
but neither of these have the MTS extensions, and the MTS folks say these
are needed to re-configure MTS
I'd love to be wrong (and I'd gladly pay four digits, as long as it's
one-time and
not per-year). It'd be hard to get very far w/o
*ASMH (it's horrible but
it's
the standard, and MTS had plenty of languages I miss
less), and writing a
clean/legal reimplementaation now would only take, say, 5000 person-years.
As I say there are at least two clean replacements, but they don't have the
MTS extras. However as Hercules allows you to change the config then the
major need for MTS Assembler H has gone away. Some folks have also worked
out how to patch some of the MTS tables to change the I/o so again reducing
the need.
All this has meen discussed in the H390-MTS group so its worth joining and
reading the info there..
John Wilson
USERHA8G at RPITSMTS.Bitnet
Dave Wade
G4UGM
(once upon a time PM27 on the Newcastle Upon Tyne MTS system)
3269
days inactive
3269
days old
11 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
dave.g4ugm＠gmail.com -
drb＠msu.edu -
jws＠jwsss.com -
lyndon＠orthanc.ca -
mta＠umich.edu -
scaron＠umich.edu -
wilson＠dbit.com