Gavin Eadie

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!"

Pardon my advertising, but if you want to learn more about this, drop a note to mts-interest-request@umich.edu and I'll add you to my mailing list.