> On Oct 12, 2025, at 5:00 PM, Jim Davis via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> We switched from IBM 1130 FORTRAN to WATFOR in 1975 at Portland State.
> Since we had the source, we added some extensions.
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
