17 Dec
2022
17 Dec
'22
8:03 a.m.
Yes, MTS (Michigan Terminal System)!
One of my first jobs as a geography grad student was helping Waldo
Tobler <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_R._Tobler> port a bunch of
his MTS Fortran* programs to UCSB's 370/168 running OS/MVT. Definitely a
step backwards, as Waldo never ceased to remind me.
He calmed down once he got a Tektronix storage tube display connected to
our PDP-11/45 running v6; seemed like UNIX was almost as nice as MTS...
/Frew
*commented in German...
On 2022-12-16 14:26, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
was any
thought given to trying to get a 360 system?
Very serious thought. However, virtual
memory was a non-negotiable
desideratum, to which Gene Amdahl was implacably opposed because
demand paging would devastate hardware performance. Soon after GE got
the nod, IBM revealed Gerrit Blaauw's skunk-works project, the 360/67,
but by then the die had been cast. Michigan bought one and built a
nice time-sharing system that was running well before Multics.