In 1976 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, USA became the sixth member of the MTS Consortium. Garance Dorsehn posted the following article on Tom Valerio's MTS Wiki in April 2005. From http://mtswiki.westwood-tech.com/mtswiki-index.php/MTS%20at%20RPI: MTS comes to RPIWhile RPI had been running IBM mainframes, student access was mostly via batch jobs (which is to say "punched cards"). As one might expect, catering to students in engineering and the sciences meant there was a large demand for computing on campus. In 1975 RPI had purchased a used(!!) IBM 360/67 from Rice University, in an attempt to do an inexpensive upgrade from their previous mainframe. That machine was simply not large enough to meet the demand, and the students made it clear that they wanted more significant improvements made to computing at RPI. Among other things, people were interested in interactive (timesharing) use of the mainframe, instead of the batch system of OS/MVT. RPI was also running a timesharing system called "Alpha", but that was not a robust system, and it had trouble supporting even a dozen concurrent users. So, RPI went searching for a timesharing-based operating system that could stand up to the demands expected from RPI's environment. Operating systems that worked on IBM mainframes would have been preferred, but in fact we looked at operating systems from Honeywell and other vendors. At one meeting of SHARE (a conference for IBM users), Wilson Dillaway had come across a group of guys talking about the MTS operating system. While that group didn't seem to be trying to sell anyone else on their work, Wilson was impressed with the discussions that were going on. Thus, MTS was one of the operating systems that RPI evaluated in early 1976. The committee unanimously recommended MTS over the alternatives, and MTS was running at RPI and available to users on a limited basis by fall of 1976. (This quick overview is what I (Garance) remember of this early history. I was a freshman at the time, and I was one of two student representatives on that committee which selected MTS. I think that committee was chaired by Don Porter, but it may have been Wilson). An e-mail from Wilson DillawayThe following is from an e-mail exchange that Wilson Dillaway and Jeff Ogden had in August and September 2010: Do you mind if I use some of the information from your reply below on the MTS archive site? -Jeff On 9/29/2010 9:33 PM Wilson Dillaway wrote: Sure! I can't say that it's accurate; only a personal off-the-cuff recollection after many decades. But if you can phrase it in those terms, then it works for me! Wilson On Aug 20, 2010, at 7:12 PM, Wilson Dillaway wrote the following in response to a question from Jeff Ogden. The quoted text that Wilson is commenting on is Garance's posting that appears above. Jeff, Good to hear from you! All these memories! Maybe the best way to respond is for me to intersperse below. Wilson From: Jeff Ogden Sent: Friday, August 20, 2010 1:06 PM To: Dillaway, Wilson Subject: Can you confirm an old story? Hi Wilson, I'm still working on the MTS Wikipedia article (in my retirement). Can you confirm this story? It sounds about right from what I remember from back then, but it was a long time ago. -Jeff MTS comes to RPI http://mtswiki.westwood-tech.com/mtswiki-index.php/MTS%20at%20RPI While RPI had been running IBM mainframes, student access was mostly via batch jobs (which is to say "punched cards"). >>>> Yes, when I came to RPI in 1973, it was a punched card shop, running MVT, with card readers and line printers “accessible by students”. The main thing that students used was the University of Waterloo’s WATFOR complier. <<<< As one might expect, catering to students in engineering and the sciences meant there was a large demand for computing on campus. In 1975 RPI had purchased a used(!!) IBM 360/67 from Rice University, in an attempt to do an inexpensive upgrade from their previous mainframe. >>>> I was hired with the understanding that the 360/50 was to be replaced with an IBM 370/158, and I was hired as the new manager of the systems group to execute that transition (coming from an insurance company in San Francisco which had two IBM 370/165 systems both running TSO for 300 Cobol programmers, in the process of upgrading to 168s). Having arrived, I found out that the president had nixed the 370/158 deal due to university financial problems. We then went looking for a used 360/65, and found a 360/67 at Rutgers in New Jersey (not Rice in Texas), which we bought used. A 67 could emulate a 65, so nothing was lost, but it had this extra capability, which was intriguing to me personally. I subsequently persuaded RPI to run CP-67 (the predecessor of VM/370) and multiple copies of OS/MVT on top of that, to make the batch processing more efficient (VMware many decades before its time!). I was the lead person working with the CP/67 software, as well as being manager, so I came to understand in much detail just how the 67 hardware worked (UMMPS-level programming), which set the stage for understanding what else might be possible. <<<< That machine was simply not large enough to meet the demand, and the students made it clear that they wanted more significant improvements made to computing at RPI. >>> The 360/67 wasn’t all that much slower than a 370/158 would have been, which simply proves that the choice of the 370/158 as the upgrade path, originally, was based on what RPI thought it could afford (before I came), and what IBM recommended, rather than any judgment of what capacity was needed. <<<< Among other things, people were interested in interactive (timesharing) use of the mainframe, instead of the batch system of OS/MVT. RPI was also running a timesharing system called "Alpha", but that was not a robust system, and it had trouble supporting even a dozen concurrent users. >>>> IBM’s recommended time sharing system would have been TSO on top of OS/MVT, which was nowhere near what IBM’s TSS was designed to be. On the 360/50, Alpha supported terminals and submitted batch jobs whose printed output could be inspected online, but it didn’t scale, as Garance notes, and we never offered it to students, only staff and a couple of faculty. It was already in place when I arrived. I don’t recall where Alpha came from; another university, I think. <<<< So, RPI went searching for a timesharing-based operating system that could stand up to the demands expected from RPI's environment. Operating systems that worked on IBM mainframes would have been preferred, but in fact we looked at operating systems from Honeywell and other vendors. At one meeting of SHARE (a conference for IBM users), Wilson Dillaway had come across a group of guys talking about the MTS operating system. While that group didn't seem to be trying to sell anyone else on their work, Wilson was impressed with the discussions that were going on. Thus, MTS was one of the operating systems that RPI evaluated in early 1976. >>>> I remember being the lead advocate for MTS back home, but I had forgotten where I had first learned about it. I was a frequent SHARE attendee, so Garance may be right. <<<< The committee unanimously recommended MTS over the alternatives, and MTS was running at RPI and available to users on a limited basis by fall of 1976. >>>> I wrote a paper comparing 17 different possible time sharing systems, and recommended MTS as the preferred outcome. That document is of course lost, and never was digital, I suspect. As a committee, we made a trip to Ann Arbor, and were graciously hosted by Mike [Alexander], as I recall. <<<< (This quick overview is what I (Garance) remember of this early history. I was a freshman at the time, and I was one of two student representatives on that committee which selected MTS. I think that committee was chaired by Don Porter, but it may have been Wilson). >>>> Don Porter worked for me (hired after I arrived); I imagine that we were both on the committee. We hired him away from Albany Medical College, were he had helped run a DEC-10? Or maybe I have my generations of DEC hardware mixed up! Anyway, he had time sharing experience on arrival. Garance describes himself here as a freshman, but he must have subsequently worked for us as a student employee, and upon graduation we hired him as a full time employee, and I gather he’s still there [yes, as of October 2010 he is]. I had forgotten that he was on the committee, though. >>>> The process of bringing MTS online, testing it under CP-67 (which no other school may yet have done at the time??), and running MTS in test in parallel with MVT in separate virtual machines seems monumentally bold and risky now, but then we didn’t know any better (the theme of MTS overall, perhaps). But that was the hardest part – getting it working under CP-67, gradually introducing it to faculty, and gradually migrating the load across, all the while continuing to run MVT batch in production, was with hindsight quite miraculous. I think we may have overlapped (MTS and MVT simultaneously on that feeble hardware) for more than a year, but I’m not sure. . . . >>>> One of the peculiar characteristics of RPI geographically is that Troy is just up the river from Poughkeepsie (or Armonk). I vaguely recall that IBM hired a tremendous percentage of our graduates (being an engineering school), and we had IBM on the Board of Trustees. They were not pleased with the choice of MTS, and when we later upgraded from the 67 to an IBM 3030 (??), we were under tremendous pressure to drop MTS and go with VM/CMS “so that our graduates would have the right skill set when they were hired”. We resisted that, but even the students were hostile (they would go on summer internships to Poughkeepsie and come back singing the praises of VM/CMS and asking us to convert). I left in 1984, and it was still a foaming issue as I left. >>>> My feeble mind has few details, and many of them came back to me only in writing this. So if anyone remembers otherwise, they are probably right!! Much fun… Wilson |