View Source: John Hogg

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.