DavecUK On mainframes, each attempt took longer and longer, by attempt 4 is was 1 hour and by attempt 5 it was a day. For many years I ran systems and had to keep them very secure.
Many, many, many years ago, when I first started working in IT (before it was even called IT - ADP Automatic/mated Data Processing) I worked on an IBM VM “Mainframe”.
One bloke “managed” the ½ dozen Sandwich Students that passed through each year.
He was terrible at keeping his password secure. The running joke with the students was, when they inevitably found it out, to booby trap his login (Profile.exec) with a “sleep 5” - which basically paused his login for 5 seconds or until enter was pressed.
Each day/when they felt like it they added another line “Sleep 5” - so unless he pressed enter his login would take progressively longer and longer.
Periodically he would come to the techies complaining the system was taking ages to start up and we would edit his profile and delete, sometimes hundreds of, lines of “sleep 5”, change his password and advise him to keep it secure….