> Good grief! how in the world did one get any work done seeing as it took 
> all night just to compile one program?

Not easily, to be sure. When I was just starting computer classes, turn-
around time for some cobol jobs could be as long as six hours. You'd go
into the lab early in the morning, and then come back a few hours later,
to see if your program got compiled and/or ran. But then we had a 
rather overloaded 370 system, and it was used for all campus DP; students
got a rather low priority. Usually things were OK, but during registration
and finals it got really bogged down. Considering a fairly large user
base, I figure one did pretty well actually. After all, compiling is
a pretty stressful task. 

But then again, compiling large jobs (kernel, emacs, that sort of 
thing) took several hours to complete when I first started on a
386sx running Linux. But of course, you could do other things in the
meantime. :) (Remember running DOS and sitting there staring at a
screen, not able to do anything until a download completed?)

And then (even some years later) really big jobs (parts of kde) could take
all night to compile, especially on an underpowered system without
enough RAM. (Our school system back then had a whopping *2* mega-
bytes of core, and could only address sixteen in virtual mode. Must
have been a *ton* of disk paging going on back there in the machine
room).

> Mark

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