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From: waterman@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: True Multitasking, and some history lessons
Message-ID: <2952@zen.berkeley.edu>
Date: Mon, 29-Jun-87 14:48:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: zen.2952
Posted: Mon Jun 29 14:48:05 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Jun-87 04:47:16 EDT
References: <8706040024.AA10895@cogsci.berkeley.edu> <163@sugar.UUCP>
Sender: news@zen.berkeley.edu
Reply-To: waterman@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (T.S. Alan Waterman)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 27

[eat this. I dare ya'...]

>Some of us remember the days when UNIX systems didn't have tons of RAM. At
>one place we had 8 users running on a PDP 11/40 with 256 K words of RAM. On
>the PDP-11 you had 128K MAX per process. When faced with these constraints
>and the lack of incentive to do much graphics (because you didn't have any)
>UNIX programs tended to be small and tight. It used to be that you could code
>the world in 64K.

And some of us remember when you could code the world in 4K (that's CORE,
buddy) on a PDP-8 or a PDP-12 running TECO to edit your assembly files. That
is, after you had booted the machine by coding in from the front panel switches
the 8 word program to start up the PAPER TAPE reader to read in OS-8 from
the tape drive.

One of the cooler memory-tight hacks on this machine was Space-War, an arcade-
type game with a gravitational sun, in which you piloted the enterprise
and a klingon ship around blowing each other up. This game, incidentally,
eventually made it to the video arcade ( I don't remember who made it,
though :-(  ). This is 4k, remember.

Just remember, tight code is good code. These 12K "ls" look-alikes
drive me nuts.

				T.S. Waterman
"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to
disclaim themselves....."