30 Jul
2025
30 Jul
'25
7:18 a.m.
On Tuesday, July 29th, 2025 at 6:15 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 10:27:23AM +1000, Jonathan
Gray wrote:
Larry if you don't mind my curiosity, were these UNIX-y utilities sitting on top of
and using CP/M services or chomping at the hardware a little more closely? Or something
else?
- Matt G.
"The remote-batch load absorbs about 5 per
cent of the 11/70 and its
residual capacity is used to serve nearly 50 interactive terminals.
I still remember, fondly (sort of) being in a terminal room with 50+
other students all hooked up to a 4MB VAX 780. The fondness was the
sort of bonding we all had from pulling all nighters to get stuff to
work (this was at UW-Madison, back then it was a hard core hacking
school, lots of Sun's kernel group came from Madison, including
Rusty (NFS) and Mojo (he wrote the 4.x VM system) and a bunch of
others).
The not so fond part was hit ^T over and over again (it gave you
a one line PS like output showing load) while your compiled seemed
swapped out forever.
The not fondness made me take out one of the very few loans I have had,
in 1985ish I borrowed $2000 to buy a Okidata CPM machine, it was a lot
slower than the VAX, but all the cycles were mine. I wrote a lot of
code on that machine. Including assembler versions of cp, rm, ls,
etc, each of which fit in 512 bytes because that was one sector on
a floppy disk, I didn't want to wait for more than one sector to
load. Fun times. Now my phone is like 10,000x faster and has
easily that much more memory.
--lm