Process accounting - did anyone ever use it?

Dave Wade dave.g4ugm at gmail.com
Thu May 30 15:00:57 CDT 2019


> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Grant Taylor via
> cctalk
> Sent: 30 May 2019 18:31
> To: cctalk mailing list <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Process accounting - did anyone ever use it?
> 
> (Credit the Quotas thread for prompting this.)
> 
> Did anyone ever use process accounting?  Did they actually bill departments
> (funny money)?
> 
> I was always intrigued by process accounting, but never had a use for it
> myself.
> 
> I guess I can thank process accounting for causing the discrepancy that Cliff
> Stole tracked down that became The Cuckoo's Egg.  :-)
> 
> 

When I worked at Refuge Assurance in Manchester, England we used process accounting on our Honeywell L66 under GCOS 3.
I don't think we really did detailed charging, but we used the accounting records to divide up the cost of running the machine among the departments.

I wrote the accounting routing .MBORT7 I think which was a small assembler routine that ran at the end of every job. 
It printed out the charges for store , disk and CPU and wrote to a journal....

I remember years after I left my wife, who worked in the company secretarial department, which is generally called governance these days,  brought a print[out home detailing some shareholdings.
After she had complained how useless the figures were, she then asked what the extra figures were on the bottom of the page. 

I explained it was a bit of code I wrote, that worked out the cost of the job!. She said as it was useless she was going to ask for a credit...
... I don't remember if she got one....


> 
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die


Dave
G4UGM



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