[TUHS] Quotas - did anyone ever use them?

[Michael Kjörling]

On 30 May 2019 06:49 -0700, from david at kdbarto.org (David):
> I think it was BSD 4.1 that added quotas to the disk system, and I
> was just wondering if anyone ever used them, in academia or
> industry. As a user and an admin I never used this and, while I
> thought it was interesting, just figured that the users would sort
> it out amongst themselves. Which they mostly did.
> 
> So, anyone ever use this feature?

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 at 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)