MTS

Lyndon Nerenberg lyndon at orthanc.ca
Mon Aug 10 15:24:41 CDT 2015


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



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