On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 9:58 AM David <david(a)kdbarto.org> wrote: Oh yes. I used them in multiple places; in fact, on a public access Unix system that I still (!!) am active on (well, not really...grex.org) we use them; mostly to try and limit the effects of abuse. Quotas were very useful in time shared and network environments, where you didn't quite trust all of the users. For example, university networks where undergrads were given accounts for course work, but could be otherwise mischievous, and you didn't want them interfering with research happening on the same system/network. - Dan C.

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 06:49:05AM -0700, David wrote: Back when MIT Project Athena was using Vax/750's as time sharing machines (before the advent of the MicroVax II workstations and AFS), students were assigned to a Vax 750, and were given a quota of I think a megabyte, at least initially. It could be increased by applying to the user accounts office. Given that there were roughly 4,000 undergraduates sharing 5 or 6 Vax/750's, it was somewhat understandable... - Ted

On 30 May 2019 06:49 -0700, from david(a)kdbarto.org (David): Don't forget probably every ISP under the sun. My first Internet account in 1995 (or possibly 1996) came with *nix shell access (please don't ask me what variant; I used it mostly to run pine, and occasionally pico, and it was dial-up which was charged per minute by the phone company) and a 4 MB quota, which you could pay to have increased. That quota covered everything in your $HOME; as I recall, including e-mail, and definitely including ~/public_html. These days, it seems that with the exception of _really_ cheap accounts, web host quotas are big enough that they for all intents and purposes might as well not be there, even with today's bloated content. Back then, even 4 MB for everything felt on the tight side, and you certainly had to think about what you put there. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

On 5/30/19 6:49 AM, David wrote: Lots of interesting insights/stories on this thread so figured i'd throw my hat in the ring and share a business anecdote... For quite a while i worked in the special effects/animation industry where fortunately (for me) unix has a long and interesting history. One secret abut the VFX world is that it's tremendously expensive with relatively little financial upside.  in my experience it is the studios who get most of the residual income from a blockbuster feature.  also a crew for a AAA feature requires lots of human power, computers and storage.  my shop frequently had 3-5 features in full production mode at the same time so we were redlining all of our systems 24/7. So aside from the cost of maintaining a large renderfarm, unix/linux 3d workstations, editing bays etc we also had an enormous NetApp footprint to support all these systems.  Now artists love creating lots and lots of high resolution images, and if they had their way there were be unlimited storage so they'd never have to archive a shot to tape in the event they need to reference it later.  But obviously that's not reasonable from a financial perspective. Our solution was to make heavy use of storage quotas in our environment, and then leverage quotas to provide per-department billing.  An individual user was given something like 1GB by default (here they had their mailbox, source-code, scripts etc), then the show they were booked on was then given an allocation of say 1TB of storage.  The show would then carve out this allocation in a per-shot basis.  This allowed us as an organization to actually keep pretty detailed records on our costs and unfortunately isn't something I've seen replicated well at lots of startups flush with cash these days. I was briefly on the team responsible for managing these quotas for a show and it was seriously an around the clock operation to keep our disks from filling up.  One of the tricks was to figure out how much space a rendered sequence of images would consume, factor in the time-to-render a frame and attempt to line up your backup jobs to free up enough space so the render nodes could write out the images to NFS. -pete -- Pete Wright pete(a)nomadlogic.org @nomadlogicLA

A couple of Cambridge quota-related anecdotes: In its early days the Debian bug tracker was run out of Ian Jackson's personal account on our central Unix service. He had to delete bugs when they were closed to keep within his disk quota. Our mail software Exim has a two-level quota system: it handles quota errors from the OS as a hard limit, with some annoying portability hacks https://github.com/Exim/exim/blob/master/src/src/transports/appendfile.c#L1… Exim it also has its own per-mailbox quota implementation. This can help control memory usage (mainly by Pine, back in the day...) as well as providing soft limit warnings and other bells and whistles. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ Southeast Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Northeast Forties: Southerly 4 or 5, becoming cyclonic 5 to 7, perhaps gale 8 later. Slight or moderate, becoming moderate or rough later. Fog patches, thundery rain later. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor.