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.<p>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!<p>[1] For more information, see the accounting sections here: <a href="http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfMichigan/mts/volumes/MTSVol01-TheMichiganTerminalSystem-Nov1991.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfMichigan/mts/volumes/MTSV...</a>
<a href="https://try-mts.com/up-and-running-1-installation/" rel="nofollow">https://try-mts.com/up-and-running-1-installation/</a><p>Get MTS running on the Hercules emulator.
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.
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 ("<i>PRINT</i>" for the printer, e.g.) to various channels, and avoid storing files, which was constrained and costly.<p>A few things I can't believe we lived with -- a flat file-space, and I think 8.3 file-names?<p>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.
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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAD_(programming_language)</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLIP_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLIP_(programming_language)</a>
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.
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<p>I’d love to hear a story about that last one