typo... sigh... TSS was definitely a supported product throughout *the 1970s and into* the 1980s ᐧ On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 1:43 PM Clem Cole wrote: > Tom Lyon -- TSS was around and supported into the 80's. That said, I've > seen that May '71, but it might be a typo -- '81 sounds much more plausible > as it real death. IIRC Tom Haight has better dates in his book. > > FWIW: I was at CMU in the mid 70s [programming TSS including installing > fixes from the IBM support team]. Plus, my old boss, Dean Hiller, left CMU > in the late 70s to work for IBM as a TSS system person [he retired from IBM > years later and had moved to the AIX team at one point]. And I also have > a copy of one of the TSS documents that has a printing date of 1980. > > It's also possible IBM stopped *selling new sites* in the early 70s, but > TSS was definitely a supported product throughout the 1980s. IBM had some > large and important customers running TSS, in particular, NASA and I > believe a couple of automotive ones -- maybe GM and Rolls Royce but I don't > know. IIRC: One of the original mechanical CAD programs had been > developed on it and users needed either MTS or TSS to run it properly. > > I also remember that in 77-78, when CMU started to move off the /67 to the > DEC-20s, IBM had counter-proposed an S370/168 with VM on it - which CMU had > rejected. But Amdahl had proposed CMU could keep running TSS on their > then-newest system which was at least the V7 (maybe the V8 as I have > forgotten when the latter was released). > > Around that same time, Michigan had stayed with MTS but had switched to > Amdhal as the vendor. > ᐧ > > On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 1:15 PM Tom Lyon wrote: > >> Clem doesn't mention CP-67/CMS, which IBM kept trying to kill in favor of >> CMS. >> From Melinda Varian's amazing history of VM, I gleaned these factoids: >> CP-67 - 8 sites by May '68 >> Feb of 68 - IBM decommits from TSS >> Apr 69 - IBM rescinds decommit of TSS >> CP-67 - 44 sites by 1970, ~10 internal to IBM >> May 71 - TSS finally decommitted >> >> So TSS was a rocky road, while CP&VM were simple and just worked. >> >> >> >> On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 9:13 AM Clem Cole wrote: >> >>> Given the number of ex-MTS (Bill Joy and Ted Kowalski, to name two) and >>> TSS hackers that were also later to be UNIX hackers after their original >>> introduction to system programming as undergrads. I will keep this reply >>> in TUHS, although it could be argued that it belongs in COFF. >>> >>> Note good sources for even more of the background of the history >>> politics at both IBM & GE can be found in Haigh and Ceruzzi's book: "A >>> New History of Modern Computing >>> " - >>> which I have previously mentioned as it is a beautiful read. >>> >>> On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 5:27 PM Douglas McIlroy < >>> douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote: >>> >>>> IBM revealed Gerrit Blaauw's skunk-works project, the 360/67, >>>> but by then the die had been cast. Michigan bought one and built a >>>> nice time-sharing system that was running well before Multics. >>>> >>> All true, but a few details are glossed over, and thus, this could be >>> misinterpreted - so I'm going to add those as one of the people. >>> >>> TSS and the /67 was IBM's answer to Multics, as Doug mentions. Note >>> that the /67 could run as a model /65, which as I understand it, most >>> of the ones IBM sold did. >>> >>> At the time, IBM offered the /67 to Universities at a >>> substantial discount (I believe even less than the /65). Thus, several >>> schools bought them with Michigan, CMU, Cornell, and Princeton that I am >>> aware of; but I suspect there were others. >>> >>> TSS was late, and the first releases could have been more stable. >>> Cornell and Princeton chose to run their systems as /65 using the original >>> IBM OS. CMU and Michigan both received copies of TSS with their systems. >>> Michigan would do a substantial rewrite, which was different enough that >>> became the new system MTS. CMU did a great deal of bug fixing, which went >>> back to IBM, and they chose to run TSS. [I believe that CMU runs OS/360 by >>> data and TSS at night until they felt they could trust it to not crash]. >>> Nominally, TSS and MTS should share programs, and with some work, both >>> could import source programs from OS/360 [My first paid programming job was >>> helping to rewrite York/APL from OS/360 to run on TSS]. So the compilers >>> and many tools for all three were common. >>> >>> MTS and TSS used the same file system structure, or it was close enough >>> that tools were shared. I don't know if OS/360 could read TSS disk packs - >>> I would have suspected, although the common media of the day was 1/2" mag >>> tape. >>> >>> This leads to a UNIX legacy that ... Ted's fsck(8) - which purists know >>> as a different name in the first version - was modeled after the disk >>> scavenger program from TSS and MTS. icheck/ncheck et al. seem pretty >>> primitive if you had used to see the other as a system programmer first. >>> Also, a big reason why all the errors were originally in uppercase was the >>> IBM program had done it. In many ways, neither Ted nor I knew any better >>> at the time. >>> >>> Clem >>> >>> >>> >>>