Editing MUSIC/SP (section)

===Other features===
One major advantage the system had in educational environments was that through the use of special lines called "control cards" at the top of a file, source files for any supported language could be automatically directed to the appropriate compiler (Fortran being the default), compiled, linked, and executed, (with compilation, linkage, and execution options also specified in control cards) simply by entering the filename on a command line.

A wide variety of [[Computer terminal|terminals]] were supported as of 1980, including both [[EBCDIC]]-based units using IBM-proprietary protocols, and asynchronous [[ASCII]]-based units. Since terminals were connected through various types of [[Front end processor|front-end processors]] (as per common IBM timesharing practice both then and now), and could therefore function without CPU attention for a considerable amount of time, MUSIC used variable-length time slices, which could, on compute-bound processing, reach a maximum of several seconds per time slice; conversely, if a user filled the output buffer or reached a conversational read, the timeslice would end immediately.