winscape 2286

It didn't matter. When it "mattered" as in poor performance, we treated it as a bug and fixed it.

IBM was stuck in card-batch thinking. It just didn't know what real timesharing was supposed to do. One approach was to start off with paritioning the machine. This wasn't timesharing; it was taking resources and dividing by four.

Yes, this is what I call user thruput. It was considered a bug in my OS.

No! My first job on a PDP-10 was to buttign 2000 PPNs and pbuttwords. This was for a KA TOPS-10 system before it was called TOPS-10. The monitor was pre-4S72; had 48K total memory and a JOBMAX of 40 (I think). This was in 1968 plus 1. Since then, DEC tried all kinds of things to increase user thruput.

You are still not getting it. I don't know how to explain better. I haven not been talking about instant gratification which is another symptom of PCitis these days.

With TOPS-10's file protection scheme, system search list and file lookup specifications, any user can install any software package and have others run it as if it were on a system directory. There was very little that needed extraordinary privileges. I could define one of your sub-directories to be searched first when I ran a system program. I could make a list of directories to search before defaulting to SYS:.

This is not afeature. This (tarring procedure) is a crock. I should be able to set up a directory that does not need a sysadmin approval procedure and be able to have other users use my directory as the first one to look at for FOO.EXE. I don't need sysadmin privileges to establish a system area for a set of users. All I need to do is set protections to allow reads.

I did not say that these users were stupid. I said that they had the whole machine available for their use. Timesharing's purpose is to ensure that the whole machine (within constraints) is available to all logged-in users all the time. Sigh! Look at the word...time....share. It means sharing all the computing resources at any time with everybody. And, since all hardware can only be used by one person at one wallclock time, these resources cannot be physically divided up; only their use can be divided up over elapsed time.

BAH