Michigan Terminal System

Re:Michigan Terminal System by reidacdc on Sunday March 12, 2023 @06:51PM (#35127505)

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.

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Re:Michigan Terminal System by jdougan on Sunday March 12, 2023 @11:10PM (#35130494)

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?)

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