My PhD advisor stayed up late at night (in the '60s) to get exclusive access to an IBM mainframe that was normally used at UC for payroll. When I joined the la

My PhD advisor stayed up late at night (in the '60s) to get exclusive access to an IBM mainframe that was normally used at UC for payroll. When I joined the lab the convention was to go find a machine that was only lightly loaded (manually; there was no batch queue, just telnet to a cluster of machines) and start your multi-month simulation and hope nobody else popped onto the machine to steal half your processor.