I don’t know if I ever documented this or not. But back in college we had a PDP-11/40 (or maybe 45). Some courses required a computer credit. The main computer courses were on the IBM mainframe. That probably would have been a steep introduction to computers. Programs were punched to cards, then read by a card reader. But the PDP-11/40 ran RSTS/E and you used Basic-Plus to program it. The programs were coded interactively on a terminal. So it was a fairly popular course for…computer and non computer people.
Hence, there were long lines of people waiting to get a terminal. The department hired student/tutors to check people in on a terminal and they would have 30 min before these “monitors” would tell them their time was up. Eventually I got a job as a tutor/monitor. I would shut the 11/40 down at night and lock up the room. I would also boot it up on the weekends. I had full access to the computer and manuals, regular students didn’t have access to and the mighty 1,2 account. Having access to 1,2 was like having access to root on Linux. So I learned much more about RSTS…than most.
After learning about SYS calls, I had an idea to write a automated student monitor program. I remember working on it one day when my teacher/boss walked in and asked me what I was doing. Nervously, I told him. Surprisingly he didn’t seem angry…supportive even. So my program would log into a table when a user would sign on, and at 25 minutes would send them a message and beeps that they had 5 minutes to finish up. I would continue sending a message each minute until 30 minutes then log or force them off. Keeping a record so they couldn’t just log right back on. This reduced the need for tutors to manually monitor people. I was pretty proud of that simple little program, all those years ago.
I was very fortunate to have a teacher/boss who trusted me…a student, enough to do this. Thank you Mr. Walton (wherever you are).