[cctalk] Re: "Fortran 11"? (Was: Old Dec/pdp11 manuals and software, is it archived?

I occasionally ran WATFIV jobs at Lawrence University (Appleton, WI). That was a bit annoying. WATFIV was a wonderfully fast load-and-go compiler for student programs, which would accept a tall stack of lots of programs to run all as a single OS job. But if one hit an infinite loop I had to cancel the job and reload WATFIV with the remaining (skipped) programs. The reason was that our 360 model 44 had "only" 128 kB of memory, and only OS/360-PCP was small enough to fit in that small a memory. (Hah. We ran a whole timesharing system for the college in half that much on the PDP 11/20.) PCP didn't support timers, so while WATFIV let you specify a job time limit that didn't do anything. I ended up doing a small kernel hack to hook the "interrupt" button on the console panel into the timer expiration handler, so you could watch for what seemed like a stuck program and just hit "interrupt" to kill it. I think this worked because that button appeared as something tied to the console printer, so I could do a control I/O request on that device. It didn't have a name but its device control block could be found, and that's all that the application needs to do I/O to it. :-) Security? Not so much, not in IBM OS/360 or /370. paul