MTCS (Minimum Teleprocessing Communications System) was a transaction processor that ran on IBM mainframe systems under OS/VS1 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 before it was released. An unofficial and multi-threaded version of MTCS was developed by

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, 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

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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 Basic Assembly Language (BAL) is the commonly used term for a low-level programming language used on IBM System/360 and successor mainframes. Originally, "Basic Assembly Language" applied only to an extremely restricted dialect designed to run unde ...

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 CICS in the late 1960s. A forerunner of MTCS was known as " FASTER" and was a higher level BTAM based product that controlled IBM 2260 display terminals

References

{{Reflist MTCS Transaction processing IBM mainframe software

Transactions

History

Further reading

See also

References