Alan Ballard worked at the UBC Computing Centre (later known as Computing Services and something else after that) from 1975 to 1993, mostly in the Systems Group. During that time he participated (with Paul Whaley? and Mark Fox?) in the development of the Plus? systems programming language, and implemented the CLParser? command line parser, the CDUpdate? source file update utility, the *Forum? conferencing program. He also worked on changes to the MTS Command Language? and the implementation of MTS Internet Support?.

He left UBC in 1993 when the Computing Center stopped doing significant MTS development, and worked as a freelance developer for some time. Since 1996 he has worked for PeopleSoft (now Oracle).

Jeff Berryman worked at the UBC Computing Centre from 1970 to 1988. Most of that time was spent in the Systems Group, working on the various parts of MTS. From the late 70's on, he was active in the MTS community, working with various people at the other sites on a number of MTS evolutionary issues. He became something of a futurist and change advocate, thinking up interesting ways to change MTS. Some of these ideas found their way into implementation. Others just created a lot of enjoyable conversation.

After MTS, he worked for about six years in a couple of government-supported nonprofit organizations whose jobs were to develop local technology companies through collaboration with universities, artists, and each other. In 1994, he returned full-time to his other main interest - audio engineering, with specialties in large-format loudspeaker design, and sound reinforcement system control and modeling. In this role, he still does a lot of programming, but all on the applications side.

Steve Burling joined the Computing Center in January 1980, after a bit more than two years working at the School of Public Health Dean's office. He started out working with Carolyn Steinhaus on the ill-fated Help project, and acting as a Counselor. After a while, he took on responsibility for *IG from Andy Goodrich, and later the MTS Editor, and even later the Disk Manager. It seems as if much of his career was spent following in Andy's footsteps. Eventually he began to spend more time working on the MTS job program, re-writing built-in commands as Plus CLSs, working on the Subtasking Monitor, coding conventions conversions, file save, etc. He had his fingers in most of MTS at one time or another, except for the supervisor.

Somewhere in the mid 1980's he had his first flirtation with management, when Jeff Ogden guilt-tripped him into taking over as manager of the MTS group. His best idea in that role was hiring Diane Bodwin, then making her be the group manager.

In 1988, he left the MTS group to go work on the IFS project, where he spent two years, returning when Bert Herzog guilt-tripped him into coming back to once again try to manage the MTS group, this time during the winding down of MTS at UM.

He spent most of the latter part of the 90s doing more customer-facing work, helping people make the transition from MTS to new, unix-based services, and acting as a "Customer Relationship Manager" (aka abuse sponge) for the Engineering College and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

In early 2000, he left ITD to join the computing support group at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a unit of the Institute for Social Research at UM. These days, he does some system administration work, looks after the few (but proud) macintosh users at ICPSR, and is the "edge" programmer of the group -- if it's trailing- or bleeding-edge, it's his. Other folks get to do the boring, middle-ground stuff.

Days leading up to MTS at RPI

Garance started out as a student at RPI? in 1975 (and he actually arrived at RPI with the name Gary Robert Drosehn). At the time, RPI had a 360/67 mainframe which was extremely overloaded, and running OS/MVT (for batch-job processing) and Alpha (time-sharing). Almost all computing was done on OS/MVT, which is to say: using punch-cards.

RPI had a student chapter of the ACM on campus, which was a very large club. They had a public meeting with the Provost of RPI at the time, and "impressed" upon him that the students were really really unhappy with the state of computing. Garance was one of the students who spoke up at that meeting. After the meeting Garance was one of the students that met with Jim Moss?, who as the Director of Computing Services at the time. Dr Moss was more than happy to have the students demanding better computer resources.

That meeting, combined with other events, convinced the administration that they needed to improve computer facilities. This included shopping around for a new operating system, and there was a committee to evaluate various candidates. Garance was one of two student representatives on that committee. I think the process was lead by either Don Porter? or Wilson Dillaway?. The committee selected MTS as the new operating system to use. By the fall semester of 1976, MTS was running on the mainframe for the first part of each day, and then later in the day it would switch back to OS/MVT.

Days officially working on MTS

In fall 1977 or spring, 1978 Garance audited a graduate-level systems programming course taught by Wilson Dillaway. Another student in the same class was Brian Eliot?. In the summer of 1978 Garance was going to leave RPI, but Wilson offered both Garance and Brian jobs as "student systems programmers". Garance initially worked on the operator's job program, and the 3270 DSR.

Garance went on to have a one-year stint as a "Junior systems programmer", and then was hired as an official "systems programmer". He tended to work on the MTS job program, the 3270 and 3420 (tape) DSR, and several CLS's. This included things like PMF (from Jim Hansen?), $MAKE, and the software management macros. He was also very interested in pulling in developments from other MTS sites to MTS at RPI, and he "made a name for himself" by doing that. RPI provided all of UofM's documentation to users at RPI, and thus it was often important that RPI pull in changes from UofM faster than was possible by using the official distributions.

He was keen on programs which helped collaboration between the MTS sites, such as MTS:FORUM (which used CRLT:CONFER at UofM), and *FORUM (written by Alan Ballard at UBC).

Garance was not the initial developer for much of anything on MTS (or at least, nothing that he remembers!), but did write major updates for some parts of the MTS job program, $MAKE, $PEEK, and SEG2:S2L. He also wrote minor updates to just about everything in the resident system, and most of the CLS's (Command Language Subsystems).

Over a few years in the early 1980's, "Gary Robert" changed his name to "Garance Alistair", and in fact that name change started because there were too many programmers with a first name of "Gary" in the MTS community! See http://www.rpi.edu/~drosehn/Personal/Gad-Name.html for the gory details.

Post-MTS work

In the late 1980's, RPI was moving away from mainframe computing, and towards unix workstations. Garance also bought a Mac Plus of his own, and found that the new Unix empire provided no reliable way for him to print. So, he did some work to provide printing for Mac users, and eventually took over the printing empire at RPI. "The printing empire" is mainly very customized versions of CAP and a version of 'lpr/lpd' which came from one of the BSD operating systems. Later that also included support for SAMBA servers for the RPI community. In the early and mid 1990's Garance provided technical support for NeXTSTEP, when the Campus Computing Store was selling NeXTstations to people at RPI, and at some nearby colleges.

RPI stopped active development of MTS by 1995, keeping it running mainly for some administrative applications that used MTS. MTS was turned off for good at RPI in summer of 1999. Basically, we (RPI) were scared of what we would do if MTS had any Y2K bugs in it...

Garance remains at RPI, mainly working on printing support, and general unix support. By 2005, that includes Redhat Linux support. Garance still does some Macintosh support, for some people running MacOS 10 at RPI. Garance is a committer in the FreeBSD project (at http://www.FreeBSD.org/), and also contributes to the OpenBSD (see http://www.OpenBSD.org/) and OpenAFS (at http://www.OpenAFS.org/) projects (mainly contributing money to those last two projects, not code...). Garance also provides the hardware and some support for a chat service called 'lily' (see http://www.freegroups.org/lily-twiki/bin/view/Lily/WebHome). This chat service is used mainly by RPI alumni, and friends of RPI alumni. This 'lily' chat server is actually a descendent from *FORUM on MTS. Not that it has any code in common, but RPI students keep writing new CMC's, and that started with their experience with *FORUM.

When he's not programming in C, Garance is using Ruby (see http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/) to write scripts, or is busy learning subversion (see http://subversion.tigris.org/). Subversion is an alternative to CVS, and some RPI graduates have worked on the project.

Things Garance still misses from MTS...

Going back to his student days, Garance was always interested in computing languages. MTS had the systems-programming language called *Plus, which was developed mainly by Alan Ballard and Paul Whaley? at UBC. Garance liked *Plus when he first saw it, and all these years later he still wishes he could be programming in *Plus instead of C...

Garance is also still interested in the Command-Language-Parser (aka CLParser?) which was written by Alan Ballard at UBC. Alan rewrote that in C, and Garance has a copy of that he hopes to use for some personal projects on Unix.

The MTS file-permissions model had features which are still not matched in most other environments, particularly in the area of PKEY?s ("program keys"). Garance's interest in OpenAFS is partially because it has a much more flexible permissions-capability than Unix has, but OpenAFS doesn't have PKeys.

And Garance still thinks that *CDUpdate and *Compare in MTS did a much better job than 'patch' and 'diff' do in the Unix world.

Gavin Eadie worked at Durham? University and then emigrated to Ann Arbor in 1979.

I'll write more about my experiences in the MTS community later but, for now, wanted to talk about MTS and now. Over Christmas 2004, after a conversation with Mike Alexander? (which went along the lines of: Gavin, "I though I might take a look at porting the 370 emulator to my Mac OS X laptop", Mike, "It's been done!"), I grabbed the open source Hercules 370 emulator and Mike's DVD-ROM of MTS didtribution tapes and (short version) got MTS running on my laptop.

There was a very strange feeling about doing this -- maybe I captured some of it in my e-mail to various interested people in early January:

"Well, I got it running !!

You may remember that tape processing was iffy, so what I did was to make two tapes with copies of DASDI and DISKCOPY respectively and use those instead to prepare and load a disk. Since I was also having trouble IPL'ing off a tape on a 3420, then flipping that tape to a 3480 for the restore to disk, I cheated and put the "same" tape on two different drives (sneaky).

You may also remember that DISKCOPY was PGNT'ing. Well, for reasons I don't know (but might have been an impact of some of the above), it started to work properly. It took about two minutes to restore the three d/r tapes to a 3380 !!

That gave me a virgin MTS 6.0 system on on disk. I made a copy of that and will keep it safe as a better starting point than fooling with tapes, in fact I'll slap a pile of this stuff on a CD if people want to play too.

IPL'ing off the disk brings up MTS nicely (the nice thing about emulated machines is that I can make my 3090 system match the default TABLES, and don't need to worry about doing it the other way round!). Telling the console MTS *LAS brings up a pile of 3270s, and we're off and running.

There's a collection of configs etc that I probably ought to do, but don't know how -- I'm going to pull the Op Manual off the *FS tape and see how to do those things. I don't have HASP running, for example, so can't "print" ...

I was going to send this message from $MES, but still need to get the TCP connections going (and remember how the SMTP program works, and remember how to permit the *OTH mailbox, etc, etc).

I have *Forum and *Plus running nicely ...

Anyway, this is something I've always had a nagging (though low-level) desire to try. Now I have it working, I'm quite amazed with my new (old) toy !!

PS: Memory plays tricks ... I, of course, remember this room full of CPU, washing machine sized disks, tape drives I could hardly see over the top of, a serious snakes' nest under the floor, and a console I would only type on with some trepidation. I have a hard time relating that to an environment that takes a few cubic inches and travels with me in my backpack!"

I attended my first MTS workshop in 1980 - although I was in the student serf category at the time. I started working for real in 82 or so, helping with communications work, where I quickly fell into bad company and the FEP project, which morphed into working on or with UBCNet, DSPs and the message multiplexor.

Since then I have moved into developing Oracle based application for managing Unix user, hosts, etc. I occasionally run into some former UBCNet folks at the LISA conference.

Ron Hall joined the UBC Computing Centre in 1967as a programmer working in the numerical analysis and statistical areas, immediately after receiving an undergraduate degree from UBC. His work at the Computing Center (and later appellations) spanned more than 30 years, as a final departure from the institution was deferred until the next nearest millennium. He enjoyed a career timeframe ('67-'69, '70-2000) that completely enveloped the reign and wane of MTS ('69-'98) at UBC.

During this time at UBC, Ron wended his way through a good deal of the spectrum of computing service areas, as well as performing some sleight of feet transitions in and out of management positions, serving as manager of the Systems Group on two occasions.

In the relatively early days of MTS, Ron was the project manger as well as one of the developers for the IF (Interactive FORTRAN) Project, a major success in provision of scientific computing support for the MTS user community that was unparalleled, not only at that time, but for many years to follow. A paper on IF was presented at the 1973 SHARE conference in Miami.

Ron also worked for a number of years doing system maintenance and development work on MTS components, and related applications such as SDS and the MTS Editor. Work in these areas led to development (with Ken Bowler) of the SWAT CLS, a unique tool that allowed the powerful SDS debugging capabilities to be applied to the inner workings of the MTS system.

During the wind-down period of MTS, Ron moved on to other endeavors, the most significant being the project manager for development of the UBC Interchange system. This system delivered cost-recovered packaged Internet services to faculty, staff, students and external customers beginning in 1994, and rapidly grew to service over 40,000 accounts. The software (Interacc/Tracc-II) that was developed in-house to support this requirement remains in production today, more than a decade later, but its service duration will most certainly not come anywhere close to matching the three-decade persistence of MTS at UBC.

John Hogg worked as a systems programmer at the UBC Computing Centre for quite a long time. Perhaps too long. He worked for the Computing Centre (later IT Services) from 1966 to 1993. In 1993 he moved, but just across campus to work in the Dean's office of Applied Science. In 1997 he left the University to be a partner in Discovery Software, which is a small software company in Abbotsford, BC.

John's association with MTS began in 1968 when the Computing Centre contracted to lease a 360/67 from IBM. This was an act of faith, based on the belief that timesharing and virtual memory would be useful components of a university computing service. TSS/360 was officially deprecated by IBM Canada: they recommended that UBC use OS/360 MVT instead. This was greeted with stunned disbelief by the technical people in the Centre. Fortunately, we heard from two sources about a talk given elsewhere in Canada by Bernie Galler in which he described UM's work on MTS.

After some cordial long distance discussions between the management of the UBC Computing Centre and the UM Computing Center, John Hogg and Peter Madderom were sent to UM to make a technical evaluation of MTS. John and Peter were promptly converted into MTS zealots by the enthusiastic missionary work of a variety of the denizens of the dusty basement of the UM Computing Centre.

John and Peter returned to UBC and persuaded the rest of the Computing Centre that MTS was a fine system and exactly what we needed to serve the UBC campus. This was not a difficult task. Any reasonable alternative to MVT would have looked really good, and MTS was much more than just a reasonable alternative. The rest, as they say, was history.

Owner: "154.20.34.234" Last edited on March 30, 2005 8:06 pm by "154.20.34.234"

I (Ralph Sayle) started working at UBC's Computing Centre as a computer operator on an IBM 7040 machine in 1968. Four months later UBC got MTS and the great adventure began.

My projects, when I joined the programming side, included writing the MTS side of the UBC Front End processor, working on Resource Manager routines like a new MSG, various DSPs (including spooling) plus the DSPDSR which was a cunning interface between the world of MTS and the coding convention world of the Subtasking Monitor. I fell onto the AkRoutines? in 1980, another J Berryman project, which was a table driven approach to system accounting, quite lovely, incredibly stable, very versatile and made MTS accounting painless.

Time flew, the world changed and in 1993 I was "traded" to UBC's Applied Science faculty where I lasted until 2003 when I... retired!

Thanks guys! MTS was a great project to work on. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and am happy I was able to make so many contributions to our community!!!

UM Computing Center employee, November 1981 through 2000. I was there when they turned out the lights on MTS @ UM.