The UTS project had its origins in work started at
Princeton University in 1975 to port UNIX to the IBM VM/370 system. Team members there were Tom Lyon, Joseph Skudlarek, Peter Eichenberger, and
Eric Schmidt. Tom Lyon joined Amdahl in 1978, and by 1979 there was a full
Version 6 Unix system on the Amdahl 470 being used internally for design automation engineering. In late 1979 this was updated to the more commonly ported
Version 7. In 1980 Amdahl announced support for Unix on the System 470. UTS (Universal Timesharing System) also ran on
National Advanced Systems mainframes. Lyon said at
USENIX in June 1981 that Amdahl had run UTS for 370 for two years internally, and unofficially distributed the operating system on request. One recipient was the
Intel 80386 engineering team, which used UNIX as the design environment, so needed UTS for Intel's IBM mainframes. In 1985 IBM announced its own mainframe Unix,
IX/370, as a competitive response to Amdahl. From 1985 UTS was based on
UNIX System V. In 1986 Amdahl announced UTS/580, the first version to optionally run
bare metal on the IBM/370-compatible Amdahl 580 series; previous Unix ports, including IX/370, always ran as
guest operating systems under the IBM
VM hypervisor. Performance improved by 25% without VM, the company said. Version 4.5 was based on Unix System V, Release 4 (SVR4). In 1987 Amdahl announced that it ended Aspen, a project started seven years earlier to create a proprietary operating system, and instead would focus on UTS. The 60 Aspen developers moved to UTS, for a total of 250 Amdahl developers on Unix. That year the company released version 1.2, and 2.0 in 1989. Version 2.0 supports
31-bit—matching
MVS/XA's ability to address up to 2GB of main memory—and
Network File System. The upgrade was available for free to the more than 200 customer sites; new customers paid $20,000 for installation. The monthly lease for UTS was $4,000 to $14,000 per month, depending on the customer's processors. Version 4.1 appeared in August 1993, with a new pricing structure of $15-25,000 for initial licenses, and monthly fees of $2,700-$5,250. == See also ==