Michigan Terminal System | Hacker News Reader

Michigan Terminal System

en.wikipedia.org

71 pointsbilegeek22 comments

Interstingly, Larry Page went to U of M and used the Michigan Terminal System. One of its prominent characteristics was charging for everything. Say you'd log on, run the command to get into the forums. When logging off, it'd tell you how much your account had been charged for CPU time, storage time, etc. [1] Each student account was given a certain amount of funny money, and woe be unto you if you exceeded it. Research accounts were presumably funded through actual grant money.

Reliable sources inform me that when Google was working on App Engine, Page took inspiration from MTS and would exhort engineers to follow its example. I am told that there was sometimes eye rolling. But when I look at my AWS and GCP bills now, it feels very familiar!

[1] For more information, see the accounting sections here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfMichigan/mts/volumes/MTSV...

> One of its prominent characteristics was charging for everything. Say you'd log on, run the command to get into the forums. When logging off, it'd tell you how much your account had been charged for CPU time, storage time, etc.

Yep, it sure did. I used it when I was there for my assembly language class. I remember my roommate used up his entire allotment of CPU time in one run where he accidentally had an infinite loop. (If I recall we were only allowed something like a few seconds of CPU time for the entire semester. It was typically all you needed.) He had a large print out about 50 pages long that said nothing but “The value of a is now 1,” over and over again. Luckily you could just tell the professor and he’d give you more time.

I heard a legend at RPI that some students figured out just how big of a job they'd need to submit to underflow the MTS money variable and give themselves a balance of 2^24 or whatever size value it was actually using. IIRC, it was a line plotter job that would have (had they not cancelled it before actually printing and making the operators very sad, which is something you don't want to do) printed a solid black square the entire size of the paper.

The first cool hack I ever saw was on the MTS system in Ann Arbor. Students would program a login screen and leave their VT100 or Tektronix terminal. The next student would think it was the real login and provide their password. Then the hackers would move their account balance to their own account.

Uncool, and not in the hacker spirit[1], as I understand it. A hack should not cause or potentially cause harm.

[1] Using the Jargon File sense, of course, rather than the modern day bogeyman.

I'm pretty sure this was fairly common on school mainframes of the era.

> Each student account was given a certain amount of funny money, and woe be unto you if you exceeded it.

This kind of thing forms part of the founding story of Project Gutenberg:

> Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

> This was totally serendipitous, as it turned out that two of a four operator crew happened to be the best friend of Michael’s and the best friend of his brother. Michael just happened “to be at the right place at the right time” at the time there was more computer time than people knew what to do with, and those operators were encouraged to do whatever they wanted with that fortune in “spare time” in the hopes they would learn more for their job proficiency.

> At any rate, Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of “normal computing,” that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given … so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries.

> He then proceeded to type in the “Declaration of Independence” and tried to send it to everyone on the networks … which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the “Internet Virus.”

> A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as Michael stated that he had “earned” the $100,000,000 because a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 of the computer users of the future.

https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...

https://try-mts.com/up-and-running-1-installation/

Get MTS running on the Hercules emulator.

Other than historical interest or nostalgia (for those who used it on real hardware), is there something of interest to find in it?

I'm not being dismissive, just curious.

Whoah! I knew Merit network was an early leader in educational computing access, and I've been in some of the former-mainframe rooms at MSU, but had no idea what was going on at UMich.

Even more sophisticated was Dartmouth Time Sharing System <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System>. Unbelievable capabilities and userbase for 1988, let alone 1968!

Don't forget about the Berkeley Timesharing System[1], Compatible Time-Sharing System[2], or Livermore Timesharing System[3], and a shocking number more[4]. The wealth of diversity even in the late 60's was amazing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Timesharing_System

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermore_Time_Sharing_System

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing#Notable_time-shar...

I mentioned DTSS's userbase for a reason. Every single Dartmouth undergraduate student from 1968 onward wrote BASIC programs during a required mathematics class. Every Dartmouth student and faculty member was free to log into DTSS at any time from hundreds of terminals scattered around campus, plus hundreds more off campus at high schools and colleges in the northeast US. This drove an incredibly high usage for both school and fun among Dartmouth people (yes, including games). Nothing like this existed anywhere else on Earth in 1968, and was still rare 20 years later.

I used to use this system in undergrad at the University of British Columbia, one of about ten or so installations. It was pretty cool at the time. I (dimly) recall it had something like output redirection, when you run your compiled executable, you can assign virtual devices ("PRINT" for the printer, e.g.) to various channels, and avoid storing files, which was constrained and costly.

A few things I can't believe we lived with -- a flat file-space, and I think 8.3 file-names?

It ran a lot of "standard" IBM OS/VS utilities, and I spent many happy hours in my summer internship squeezing a few extra milliseconds out of my FORTRAN-H executables.

SCARDS/INPUT, SPRINT/PRINT, SPUNCH/OBJECT, GUSER, 0...99

  $ RUN *SYSPROG SCARDS=3FTJ:INPUT.DAT SPRINT=*VIRTDEV*

I was at UBC from late '84 to around '90. One of the last to use unit-record equipment as the undergrad Mac Lab went in around summer '95. I had a lot of fun with the MTS command macro facility and wrote a (highly) simplified sh(1) that let me do redirections and "pipelines" with a mostly sh syntax.

The part I miss is the system support for line oriented files and the tricks you could do with the command language to specify subsets of lines in a given file.

    FILE(1,8)

will only include lines 1 through 8.

The file system naming scheme was essentially 2 level: location(account/public/temporary/device), and the name (12 characters). Somewhere I have a *Forum log where they were contemplating adding a hierarchal filesystem with the sort of arguing you would expect.

(hmmm...are you Andrew Reid?)

I remember using that at SFU from my undergrad days. The Computing Staff (well, the managers) got lazy and didn't want to move off of it way after it was obvious that its glory days were past, and one of Unix/Microsoft were the way of the future. They were all fired one day and the remaining staff were told to move the entire infrastructure (minus some of the stuff like payroll, administration) over to Unix by end of year.

I spent far, far too much of my undergrad time on *forum, I don't think I've ever used a conferencing systems as seamless as that one.

See also MAD / Michigan Algorithm Decoder whose ?? successor (MAD-SLIP) was the language ELIZA was written in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLIP_(programming_language)

Funny to see this here now. Just a few days ago, I was telling someone about how the CS280 class I took in my first semester at UMich involved writing Pascal running on MTS. We started the semester with $20 of compute time in our accounts and it was possible to blow through all of that if you weren't careful about how you wrote your code.

And in 92, EECS280 made you do your first program in Pascal and then it was C for the rest of the curriculum. Lots of people were pissed they learned Pascal for one program.

It wasn't Pascal on MTS in '92, right? I seem to remember my first year ('90) being the last for MTS in EECS280 (if not entirely).

IIRC, we did one program in C at the end of the class but the rest were Pascal.

Does seem like an odd choice to use two different languages in that class.

Used MTS at Durham University (UK) in the late 80s/ early 90s. I think the terminals were Lear Siegler ADM2s or something similarly old school. IIRC the real value of the environment was the forum software that allowed students to chat with one another.

When I first read about the MTS, and saw that it was used at Wayne State, I asked my friend if he remembered it from his time there in the 70s and he said he used it quite a bit and remembered it well.

> MTS was used on a production basis at about 13 sites in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and possibly in Yugoslavia

I’d love to hear a story about that last one

Reply on news.ycombinator.com