I sent the following correction to John Woodford, the Executive Editor of Michigan Today. Mr. Woodford's brief reply follows. I was reading the article "Engineering's 150 Years" in the Summer 2004 issue of Michigan Today (Vol. 36, No. 2) and was disturbed to read on page 8 "Armed with a new IBM 370 mainframe but no operating system, College programmers began to develop the Michigan Terminal System, ...". This statement is not true. MTS was developed by the staff of the UofM Computing Center and the Computing Center was never part of the College of Engineering. While the faculty, students, and staff of the College of Engineering were active users of MTS, they played little or no role in the system's early development. The Computing Center was administratively under the Vice President for Research and its first director, Robert C. F. Bartels, was a Professor of Mathematics in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. In 1966 there were no IBM 370 computers. At that time the systems from IBM were part of the 360 series and the University of Michigan made arrangements with IBM to build an experimental system equipped with hardware to support virtual memory. This system was originally designated the IBM 360/65M (M for Michigan), but was changed by IBM to the 360/67 when other organizations wanted to purchase similar systems. At the time IBM had no operating system that used the virtual memory hardware, but was developing a system called Time Sharing System (TSS) that would. Delivery of TSS was delayed and eventually cancelled by IBM and the UofM made a decision to continue development of MTS, a system that was originally developed to gain some experience with the 360/67 hardware while waiting for TSS to arrive. There are several good articles giving the history of the Computing Center and MTS available on the Web: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/79605 http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/5567-ahead-of-its-time-u-m-computing-center-celebrates-45-years http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015040313788?urlappend=%3Bseq=89 http://www.clock.org/~jss/work/mts/index.html Two articles giving the history of the Merit Computer Network are available on the Web as well. See: http://www.merit.edu/about/history/ I encourage you to print a correction in a future issue of Michigan Today. Sincerely, Jeff Ogden former Sr. Associate Director, Computing Center former Associate Director, Merit Network IT Manager, Michigan Center for Biological Information (MCBI) John Woodford's reply: Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 10:43:24 -0400 From: John Woodford To: Jeff Ogden Subject: Re: Engineering's 150 Years, MTS, and Merit Will do. This is the second such correction. Thanks. JW |
Myths and misconceptions > Corrections and comments on "Engineering's 150 Years" in the Summer 2004 issue of Michigan Today >