Re: At University at Durham (and Newcastle)..
..they ran a slightly obscure OS on their s370 called MTS (the Michigan Terminal System).
Unusually for a mainframe OS of the time (I was there in 1978 on), it drove interactive terminal sessions, and our use was controlled by accounting limits. Not surprisingly, these limits were, well, limiting.
Ah, yes, MTS. I remember it well. I passed two years as a beginning student at RPI (the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, aka "the Tute Screw", in Troy NY) in 1984-1986. The student mainframe, an IBM 3081D (for "dual" = dual processor, nicknamed "Sybil"(1)), ran MTS instead of an IBM OS, and yes, we had accounting limits turned on, even for class-specific accounts. It was annoying when I had some time free during the day and I could burn through my current batch of CPU-time pseudo-dollars without the slightest difficulty in an hour or so of compile-run-edit-compileagain.
(1) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Ardell_Mason for why that might be.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
