14 Oct
2025
14 Oct
'25
3:11 a.m.
On Mon, Oct 13, 2025 at 9:12 PM Paul Koning via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
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.
I remember running simple FORTRAN jobs on the WATFIV compiler at Ohio
State in 1984, on an Amdahl of some recent vintage. The jobs had an
incredibly small CPU limit, so if you had an infinite loop, you
exhausted your CPU quota and got killed (it was under 1 sec of CPU
time IIRC - large for the length of time our simple jobs were running,
but small by outside standards). ISTR you had to do some JCL magic if
you wanted to run programs that really did take multiple CPU seconds
(and your funny-money account took a pretty big hit for it).
-ethan