12 Sep
2014
12 Sep
'14
7:18 p.m.
On Sep 12, 2014, at 11:12 AM, scj(a)yaccman.com wrote:
A gentle reminder that in that era, 4K words of memory
cost in the 5
digits of $'s, and many Unix machines had far less than the 64K bytes
(yes, K) that was the maximum. And there was no paging. Piping was kind
of a poor man's paging to write programs that would work on small-memory
machines.
While there were benefits, it was also a big pain, especially when
debugging. And for the most part, we abandoned this style when we got
32-bit machines that had as much as a (gasp!) megabyte of memory...
Sure beat the heck out of trying to get overlays right. I remember “fondly”
trying to get the overlay layout manager working to get the FORTRAN programs
I was writing at the time to fit into 64k (or was it 48k). Switching from the PDP-11
to the VAX was a godsend and all that moved into the kernel and got way simpler
from the user perspective…
Warner