On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 09:04:47AM -0800, Drew Derbyshire wrote:
On 1/18/21 11:00 PM, Mark L. Gaubatz via groups.io wrote:
Interesting rates ? especially the commercial rates. At these rates, my
work on a single five-month project alone at the time would have had a
direct cost of roughly $7MM, and over $640MM in resources for QA (we were
running 16 engines, and sometimes more, 24x7, on machines significantly
faster than the 3090 at the time).
What kind of machine?
Were you the commercial rate?? Academic billing can be funny.
I know at Clarkson in late 1970's, there two type of charges on the
S/630-65J under OS/360: "funny" and "real" money.?? Most charges for routine
use were funny, but physical supplies like paper and cards were real.
A few years earlier ( early 1970's ), at the University of Alberta, our
360/67 running MTS, had a "system" called SOB Balls ( Student Oriented
Batch ), a funny money system, where students were alotted clear plastic
balls, smaller than ping-pong balls, which were handed in at the window
where they submitted their decks of cards and received their printed
output, one ball in exchange for one run.
More senior classes and instructors had terminal access, either through
Decwriters or glass terminals of various sorts ( AJ's being one ).
Those communicated through the PDP-11 front end machines.
Being a student at the time, I didn't have any contact with real
billing. As well as all of the academic work on that machine that
happened during the day time, the machine was switched to MVS during the
middle of the night to run administrative batch jobs.
The 360/67 was replaced with an Amdahl 470 and then 580, still running
MTS.
Brian McCullough
