Multiple Console Time Sharing System

Last updated
GM Multiple Console Time Sharing System (MCTS)
Developer General Motors Research Laboratories
OS family Multics
Working stateHistoric
Initial release1970s
Available in English
Platforms Control Data Corporation STAR-100
Kernel typeN/A
Default
user interface
Command-line interface
License none

The Multiple Console Time Sharing System (MCTS) was an operating system developed by General Motors Research Laboratories in the 1970s for the Control Data Corporation STAR-100 supercomputer. MCTS was built to support GM's computer-aided design (CAD) applications. [1]

Contents

MCTS was designed starting in 1968. It was written in a high-level systems programming language "Malus", a dialect of PL/I. A superset of Malus called Apple became the primary application language. [2]

MCTS was based on Multics. [3] All access to data was thru the virtual memory system. Only the system paging support module was concerned about the physical location of the data. [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination of the two. Virtual machines differ and are organized by their function, shown here:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exokernel</span> Operating system kernel developed by the MIT Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group

Exokernel is an operating system kernel developed by the MIT Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group, and also a class of similar operating systems.

In computer science, a single address space operating system is an operating system that provides only one globally shared address space for all processes. In a single address space operating system, numerically identical logical addresses in different processes all refer to exactly the same byte of data.

Randy Howard Katz is a distinguished professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley of the electrical engineering and computer science department.

In computer science, capability-based addressing is a scheme used by some computers to control access to memory as an efficient implementation of capability-based security. Under a capability-based addressing scheme, pointers are replaced by protected objects which specify both a location in memory, along with access rights which define the set of operations which can be carried out on the memory location. Capabilities can only be created or modified through the use of privileged instructions which may be executed only by either the kernel or some other privileged process authorised to do so. Thus, a kernel can limit application code and other subsystems access to the minimum necessary portions of memory, without the need to use separate address spaces and therefore require a context switch when an access occurs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gernot Heiser</span> Australian computer scientist

Gernot Heiser is a Scientia Professor and the John Lions Chair for operating systems at UNSW Sydney, where he leads the Trustworthy Systems group (TS).

The SHARE Operating System (SOS) is an operating system introduced in 1959 by the SHARE user group. It is an improvement on the General Motors GM-NAA I/O operating system, the first operating system for the IBM 704. The main objective was to improve the sharing of programs.

Michael Burrows, FRS is a British computer scientist and the creator of the Burrows–Wheeler transform, currently working for Google. Born in Britain, as of 2018 he lives in the United States, although he remains a British citizen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander G. Fraser</span> British-American computer scientist (1937–2022)

Alexander G. Fraser, also known as A. G. Fraser and Sandy Fraser, was a noted British-American computer scientist and the former Chief Scientist of AT&T.

DAC-1, for Design Augmented by Computer, was one of the earliest graphical computer aided design systems. Developed by General Motors, IBM was brought in as a partner in 1960 and the two developed the system and released it to production in 1963. It was publicly unveiled at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in Detroit 1964. GM used the DAC system, continually modified, into the 1970s when it was succeeded by CADANCE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kernel (operating system)</span> Core of a computer operating system

The kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the utilization of common resources e.g. CPU & cache usage, file systems, and network sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded on startup. It handles the rest of startup as well as memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ion Stoica</span> Romanian–American computer scientist

Ion Stoica is a Romanian–American computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing and computer networking. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of AMPLab. He co-founded Conviva and Databricks with other original developers of Apache Spark.

Kai Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist and professor of Princeton University. He is noted for his work on Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) and co-founding the storage deduplication company Data Domain Inc. which was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2009.

Kenneth P. Birman is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He currently holds the N. Rama Rao Chair in Computer Science.

Marinus Frans (Frans) Kaashoek is a Dutch computer scientist, entrepreneur, and Charles Piper Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

iMAX 432 was an operating system developed by Intel for digital electronic computers based on the 1980s Intel iAPX 432 32-bit microprocessor. The term micromainframe was an Intel marketing designation describing the iAPX 432 processor's capabilities as being comparable to a mainframe. The iAPX 432 processor and the iMAX 432 operating system were incompatible with the x86 architecture commonly found in personal computers. iMAX 432 was implemented in a subset of the original (1980) version of the Ada, extended with runtime type checking and dynamic package creation.

Sanjay Ghemawat is an Indian American computer scientist and software engineer. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Google in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Ghemawat's work at Google, much of it in close collaboration with Jeff Dean, has included big data processing model MapReduce, the Google File System, and databases Bigtable and Spanner. Wired have described him as one of the "most important software engineers of the internet age".

Dawson R. Engler is an American computer scientist and an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael J. Freedman</span> American computer scientist

Michael J. Freedman is an American computer scientist who is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where he works on distributed systems, networking, and security. He is also the cofounder of database company Timescale.

The Associative Programming Language (APL) is a database language developed by General Motors Research Laboratories in 1966.

References

  1. Elshoff, James L.; Ward, Mitchel R. (January 1976). "The MCTS operating system". ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. 10 (1): 18–38. doi: 10.1145/775314.775317 .
  2. 1 2 Brown, R.R; Elshoff, J.L.; Ward, M.R. (1 Oct 1975). "The GM Multiple Console Time Sharing System". ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. 9 (4): 7–17. doi:10.1145/775310.7753 (inactive 2024-07-05). Retrieved July 1, 2024.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2024 (link)
  3. Krull, pg. 54

Further reading