The 2260 and 3270 DSRs

Only one name can come to mind when looking at these two DSRs: UBC’s Dave Twyver.

Dave wrote the MTS 2260DSR just after MTS arrived at UBC in 1969. In 1972, Dave saw IBM demonstrating the 3270 at a SHARE conference, he came home and told UBC’s management that we wanted them. He got them.

His programming base was his 2260DSR and he rapidly developed the 3270DSR. The device was a star in the MTS world right from the start; users walking across campus to use it and programmers loved working on the support.

Although Dave left UBC in 1974, he left behind a fully functional DSR and one that became a popular development platform.

Dave’s immediate successor in 3270 development was Michigan’s Jim Hamilton who took over the DSR support adding internal support and more features including %Grab and its companion %Flip.

A year plus after Dave left, Ralph Sayle took over support at UBC and his contributions included changing the DSR to dynamically configure itself for the different 3277 screen sizes and %Activity. (Note Jeff Ogden wrote the code that snooped at the device and figured out which model the device was.)

Jeff Ogden did UM support after Jim left and Tom Valerio followed Jeff.

The 3270DSR was brilliant code that made the 3270 the device of choice for many users in the 70s. UBC used it as a model for their Front End Processor System: character editing, scrolling, line re-entry, etc.

For those people who are not familiar with MTS, the screen-shot at http://mtswiki.westwood-tech.com/ is from the 3270DSR.