[hga]

I was a bit foggy on some of the details of course, but imagine a culture where you only took what you needed.

That was indeed the culture of ITS, but it was mediated by very competent and humane admins. The nature of AI research meant that there were times some would need to pretty much take over the machine to do something hard, or quasi-real time (e.g. robotics, or a demo). So this was allowed, but e.g. I remember ... Jeff Schiller, I think it was, telling about how someone upped the priority of a long computation on MIT-MC too high, and rather than kill it and lose what it had accomplished up to that point, they set it to a lower priority (which, I note, anyone with the requisite system knowledge could do) so it wouldn't interfere with other users, and then educated the user about how to politely accomplish his goals (e.g. MIT-MC had a lot of spare cycles at times, it was bloody fast by the time dawn broke, and logged in from the VT-52 in the middle of it I could see lights advance every time I typed in a character).