Obtaining MTS (Michigan Terminal System) OS

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Terminal_System)

Developed in 1967 at the University of Michigan for use on IBM S/360-67, S/370 and compatible mainframe computers, it was developed and used by a consortium of eight universities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom over a period of 33 years (1967 to 1999)

MTS was created as while IBM had been able to produce hardware that supported dynamic address translation and virtual memory the hardware was available long before IBM could provide an operating system that could use the new features. So MTS was developed initially by University of Michigan ias a interim measure and later maintained and enhanced by both them and the many other Universites that had begun using it.

MTS was in use for 33 years and will run on anything from IBM S/360-67 through to IBM 3090 and ES/9000 hardware which was a pretty good run for an interim measure; although the fact that it ran as well as anything IBM could provide and universities running it were spared the cost of expensive IBM operating system license fees it's longevity is probably not supprising.

It is available as a running single disk system with all the standard system users plus nine 'normal' users defined; and just runs. It also has many compilers installed so just follow the tutorial link below and have fun.

The best tutorial on getting MTS running under hercules is probably the extremely easy to follow guide at https://try-mts.com/why-try-mts/ which covers not only obtaining the required OS media and getting it running (and of course how to cleanly shut it down) but provides instructions on what users are available for use, logging on, user administration, using tapes, commands available to admins and users, and pretty much everything you need to use it productively such as manuals.

Personally, I think it's pretty cool; if a little confusing to someone used to TSO as such things as JCL, as of course MTS is it's own time sharing environment and has it's own powerfull command language rather than JCL.