[mikewarot]

In the computer labs in the 1980s, you had a room with 100 or so VT100 terminals each with a Computer Science student trying to get their programs written, served by a DEC VAX 11/780 running VMS. They had routed the compiler into a batch queue because it was resource intensive. Unfortunately, the batch queue was set to background priority, so compiles didn't get done for about 30-60 minutes.

One Saturday, I figured this out, and started pushing the first job in the queue to above interactive priority, and it would finish in a few seconds. I repeated... and repeated this manual tweaking.... about 2 hours later, everyone had gotten their work done faster than usual, and the room was practically empty.

Most academic environments suffered from similar issues... too many students all trying to get their work done at the last minute.

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When I got my own PC/AT clone and ran Turbo Pascal, the compile times were effectively instant (on the order of a few seconds), and just kept getting faster with each new release.