IBM 610 workstation computer 3425

the 370-195 in bldg. 28 was setup as a service for lots of organizations. pasc's 370-145 was setup just for pasc's personal computing use.

pasc had a big number crunching job that only took several hrs to run on the 370-195 ... but over time the 370-195 service acquired a bigger and bigger backlog of number crunching jobs (and turn-around time is a combination of queuing time and actual service time).

at some point, somebody realized that the idle time on the pasc machine intended for personal computing use ... could be harnessed for doing number crunching intensive application. this is somewhat analogous to some of the current distributed applications that have harnessed the idle time on thousands of personal computers for tackling compute intensive applications (although the pasc application wasn't amenable to distributed implementation ... its use of idle time on computer installed for personal computing uses has some similarities).

part of the issue is realizing that a tool could be adapted for purposes that it wasn't originally intended to be used ... i.e. the idle time on a computer installed for interactive computing use could be adapted for single long running compute intensive application.

the 370-195 service was extremely popular with the computing intensive, number crunching community ... but wasn't very popular with the interactive, personal computing crowd. idle time was a characteristic of hard-to-use and-or unpopular computers ... but also started to become a characteristic of computers installed for interactive, personal computing use ... especially as the trade-off between people time costs and computer time costs shifted.

during this poriod ... before idle time was widely accepted as overhead for optimizing for personal computing use ... there were lots of studies on the effect of interactive response on personal productivity ... and different clbuttes of systems that either did well or poorly at providing interactive response (could a system be created that optimized for total, 100 percent system resource utilization while still providing optimized interactive response). this was an era of the arguments about whether subsecond response was either good or bad for humans, whether it might actually make a different in human productivity, and-or whether optimizing for human productivity was actually a good or bad thing.

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