Michigan Terminal System - MTS Consortium

MTS Consortium

MTS was developed, maintained, and used by a consortium of eight universities in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom:

• University of Michigan (UM), 1967 to 1997, US
• University of British Columbia (UBC), 1968 to 1998, Canada
• NUMAC (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Durham, and Newcastle Polytechnic), 1969 to 1992, United Kingdom
• University of Alberta (UQV), 1971 to 1994, Canada
• Wayne State University (WSU), 1971 to 1998, US
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), 1976 to 1999, US
• Simon Fraser University (SFU), 1977 to 1992, Canada
• University of Durham (NUMAC), 1982 to 1992, United Kingdom

Several sites ran more than one MTS system: NUMAC ran two (first at Newcastle and later at Durham), Michigan ran three in the mid-1980s (UM for Maize, UB for Blue, and HG at Human Genetics), UBC ran three or four at different times (MTS-G, MTS-L, MTS-A, and MTS-I for general, library, administration, and instruction).

Each of the MTS sites made contributions to the development of MTS, sometimes by taking the lead in the design and implementation of a new feature and at other times by refining, enhancing, and critiquing work done elsewhere. Many MTS components are the work of multiple people at multiple sites.

In the early days collaboration between the MTS sites was accomplished through a combination of face-to-face site visits, phone calls, the exchange of documents and magnetic tapes by snail mail, and informal get-togethers at SHARE or other meetings. Later, e-mail, computer conferencing using CONFER and *Forum, network file transfer, and e-mail attachments supplemented and eventually largely replaced the earlier methods.

The members of the MTS Consortium produced a series of 82 MTS Newsletters between 1971 and 1982 to help coordinate MTS development.

Starting at UBC in 1974 the MTS Consortium held annual MTS Workshops at one of the member sites. The workshops were informal, but included papers submitted in advance and Proceedings published after-the-fact that included session summaries. In the mid-1980s several Western Workshops were held with participation by a subset of the MTS sites (UBC, SFU, UQV, UM, and possibly RPI).

The annual workshops continued even after MTS development work began to taper off. Called simply the "community workshop", they continued until the mid-1990s to share expertise and common experiences in providing computing services, even though MTS was no longer the primary source for computing on their campuses and some had stopped running MTS entirely.