MTCS (Minimum Teleprocessing Communications System) was a transaction processor that ran on

IBM mainframe IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the large computer market. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of th ...

systems under

OS/VS1 Operating System/Virtual Storage 1, or OS/VS1, is a discontinued IBM mainframe computer operating system designed to be run on IBM System/370 hardware. It was the successor to the OS/360 and successors#MFT, Multiprogramming with a Fixed number of ...

and

DOS/VS Disk Operating System/360, also DOS/360, or simply DOS, is the discontinued first member of a sequence of operating systems for IBM System/360, System/370 and later mainframes. It was announced by IBM on the last day of 1964, and it was first d ...

. MTCS was available from IBM and designed for rapid, low to medium volume online processing. This process was entirely interactive (screen-oriented using

3270 The IBM 3270 is a family of block oriented display and printer computer terminals introduced by IBM in 1971 and normally used to communicate with IBM mainframes. The 3270 was the successor to the IBM 2260 display terminal. Due to the text ...

display terminals). The 'official' version of MTCS was single thread only and was a forerunner of

CICS IBM CICS (Customer Information Control System) is a family of mixed-language application servers that provide online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE. CICS family products ...

before it was released. An unofficial and multi-threaded version of MTCS was developed by Littlewoods Pools, UK at the same time as a multi-threaded "MTCS bridge" (

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement co ...

MTCS simulator) became available for running MTCS transactions directly under CICS. This version was also used by other customers including

Granada Productions ITV Studios is a British multinational television production and distribution company owned by the British television broadcaster ITV plc. It handles production and distribution of programmes broadcast on the ITV network and third-party broadca ...

under a license agreement.

Transactions

An MTCS transaction is a set of operations which together perform a task. Usually, the majority of transactions are relatively simple tasks such as updating the balance of an account. MTCS applications comprise transactions which were written in IBM Basic Assembly Language and interfaced with

terminals. Each MTCS program was initiated using a transaction identifier. MTCS screens were sent as native

datastreams to the terminal.

History

The first release of MTCS was made available prior to the first release of

in the late 1960s. A forerunner of MTCS was known as " FASTER" and was a higher level BTAM based product that controlled

IBM 2260 The text-only monochrome IBM 2260 cathode-ray tube (CRT) video display terminal (Display Station) plus keyboard was a 1964 predecessor to the more-powerful IBM 3270 terminal line which eventually was extended to support color text and graphics ...

display terminals

References

{{Reflist MTCS Transaction processing IBM mainframe software

Transactions

History

Further reading

See also

References