[HECnet] long term paks

[Thomas DeBellis]

Wow, what a fine hack!  Thanks for the pointer.  And now for a bit of 
memory...

42 years ago, a pal of mine from High School scored up a set of tickets 
for us to watch Emerson, Lake and Palmer at the RPI Field House.  All I 
had to do was get myself over there...  I was almost lucky.  As I was a 
student at WPI, there were remnants of train service between Worcester 
and Rensselaer.  After extensive campaigning, lobbying and groveling to 
my parents, they bought me a ticket on Amtrak.

Right in the middle of the biggest snow storm the Northeast had seen in 
many years...  Amtrak made it through, but I only had $10 for cab fare 
(which should have been enough).  It was a pretty nerve wracking ride up 
to campus.  And I didn't have all the money...  So I asked the cabbie to 
wait while my friend went to nearly one of his friends in the dorm 
borrowing the money. Just as we had gotten it all together, the cabbie 
came inside looking distinctly ... /concerned/.

ELP was late getting on the stage (small wonder) so my friend took me on 
a tour of the campus.  At the time, RPI had been running MTS for two 
years and the big rage was to use that (timesharing) instead of being 
stuck with batch and card decks. We had both been long time users of 
Tops-10 and really couldn't understand what the buzz was.  We liked that 
3270's were waay faster than the ASR33's we had been using, but did not 
understand half-duplex.

I noted that MTS has a HASP subsystem. Against my better judgement, I 
downloaded several tapes of IBMSPL and the DN60 (PDP-11) front end 
source code and updates and started perusing them.  If there is a 
different way to speak bi-sync (maybe over IP), then I don't doubt that 
I could stub out the calls to the DN60 and replace them with IP.  I'd 
'just' need to fool the user mode JSYS interface (D60JSI).

Doable, I think.  I guess maybe I'll have a look at JNET at some point.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 3/14/20 9:46 AM, Frank Wortner wrote:
>
> You can check out its coolness here: https://try-mts.com/why-try-mts/
>
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>     On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 4:52 PM Thomas DeBellis
>     <tommytimesharing at gmail.com <mailto:tommytimesharing at gmail.com>>
>     wrote:
>
>     MTS would be cool (but it isn't IBM).
>
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