Yes, MTS (Michigan Terminal System)!
One of my first jobs as a geography grad student was helping Waldo 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...
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.