[ih] Fwd: History of "accounts"

[John R. Levine]

> Remember that "incredibly expensive" notwithstanding, accounting could
> easily be done based on the wall clock (or even a punch clock, which I
> vaguely remember in some installations) until operating systems got
> smart enough to run more than one job at a time.

Alan Perlis told me that when he was at CMU, he came into his office one 
Sunday evening and was startled when he tripped over a body in the hall in 
the dark. When he turned on the light, he found a line of sleeping women, 
grad students' wives (this was the 1950s) waiting for the signup sheet for 
the IBM 650 to be posted Monday morning.

There really is nothing new about job accounting for expensive equipment 
used for different jobs.  I expect there were accounting sheets for 
electromechanical tab equipment in the 1930s, and for belt driven machine 
shops in the 1830s.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly