The software may be described as a multiprogramming, multiprocessing, virtual memory, time-sharing supervisor that runs multiple resident, reentrant programs.

Among these programs is the Michigan Terminal System (MTS) for command interpretation, execution control, file management, and accounting.

End-users interact with the computing resources through MTS using terminal, batch, and server oriented facilities.

[5] Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is believed to be the last site to use MTS in a production environment.

[9] At that time the work that computers could perform was limited by their small real memory capacity.

A paper titled Program and Addressing Structure in a Time-Sharing Environment by Bruce Arden, Bernard Galler, Frank Westervelt (all associate directors at UM's academic Computing Center), and Tom O'Brian building upon some basic ideas developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was published in January 1966.

[10] The paper outlined a virtual memory architecture using dynamic address translation (DAT) that could be used to implement time-sharing.

After a year of negotiations and design studies, IBM agreed to make a one-of-a-kind version of its S/360-65 mainframe computer with dynamic address translation (DAT) features that would support virtual memory and accommodate UM's desire to support time-sharing.

They were all intrigued by the time-sharing idea and expressed interest in ordering the modified IBM S/360 series machines.

With this demonstrated interest IBM changed the computer's model number to S/360-67 and made it a supported product.

[11] The time-sharing experiment began as a "half-page of code written out on a kitchen table" combined with a small multi-programming system, LLMPS from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory,[1] which was modified and became the UM Multi-Programming Supervisor (UMMPS) which in turn ran the MTS job program.

Development of TSS took longer than anticipated, its delivery date was delayed, and it was not yet available when the S/360-67 (serial number 2) arrived at the Computing Center in January 1967.

[12] At this time UM had to decide whether to return the Model 67 and select another mainframe or to develop MTS as an interim system for use until TSS was ready.

[22] In the mid-1980s several Western Workshops were held with participation by a subset of the MTS sites (UBC, SFU, UQV, UM, and possibly RPI).

[32] By late 1991 MTS at UM was running on an IBM ES/9000-720 supporting over 600 simultaneous terminal sessions and from 3 to 8 batch jobs.

UMMPS, the supervisor, has complete control of the hardware and manages a collection of job programs.

The manual series MTS: The Michigan Terminal System, was published from 1967 through 1991, in volumes 1 through 23, which were updated and reissued irregularly.

The second edition from December 1967 covered: The following MTS Volumes were published by the University of Michigan Computing Center[2] and are available as PDFs:[107][108][109][110]

Various aspects of MTS at the University of Michigan were documented in a series of Computing Center Memos (CCMemos)[108][113] which were published irregularly from 1967 through 1987, numbered 2 through 924, though not necessarily in chronological order.

[126] D6.0A is based on the D6.0 version of MTS from 1988 with various fixes and updates to make operation under Hercules in 2012 smoother.

[123] As of December 22, 2011, the MTS Distribution materials are freely available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC BY 3.0).

The licensees received a copy of the full set of MTS distribution tapes, any incremental distributions prepared during the year, written installation instructions, two copies of the current user documentation, and a very limited amount of assistance.