The Resource Manager

Resource Manager Background

The idea of UBC writing a spooling system came up in 1974, after the first MTS workshop. An expanded UBC Systems Group was looking for a project to give them coherence and direction. Updating HASP (Houston Automatic Spooling System) came up as a most worthwhile project but should the group upgrade to the new version or … write a spooling system from scratch!

Jeff Berryman and John Hogg brainstormed, convincing each other that a new spooling system was a reasonable and worthwhile project. Their brainstorming was presented to the 2nd MTS Workshop at Edmonton in 1975 with UBC received the community’s blessing to go ahead with the Resource Manager.

Aside from replacing HASP, other items were added to the design.

  • The Coding Conventions were designed to provide standard subroutine calling sequences, a stack, global storage with a transfer vector, etc. They were to be implemented with assembler macros.
  • The MTS Intertask Communication Facility was designed to provide more function than its NUMAC predecessor, to fit in the RM’s I/O model.
  • The Subtasking Monitor was designed to manage asynchronous supervisor interrupts, enabling them to be treated synchronously by the Monitor’s dispatcher: Device interrupts, Intertask, Timer, Signal events, etc.
  • An RM I/O Model was developed based on MTS’s DSR Interface but with a more balanced set of entries: Initialize/Release, Open/Close, Read/Write, and Control/Sense. These were called Device Support Programs (DSPs) and were highly adaptable. They were stackable so, for example to implement remote printing on the UBC Front End, the UBC’s Printronix DSP called the UBC FECP DSP which called the Intertask DSP. The X25DSP was used by the UBC Network but was later used by the Channel-to-Channel adaptor DSP.
  • A generalized approach to system accounting was designed so that charging could be done by MTS as well as the RM.

In 1976, representatives of the MTS community gathered at Ann Arbor for the 3rd MTS Workshop and UBC offered papers on all the above areas… and more.

more later! Perhaps by others?