On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 4:30 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

On Wed, 14 Feb 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:

All, my journal paper on PDP-7 Unix has just been licensed under CC-BY-SA, so here's a link to the PDF version:

Wow!

I'm still astonished at the constraints those guys had to suffer:

PDP-7 Unix provided a multitasking environment by dividing the 8K
words of memory into two halves. The lower half of memory was
reserved for the kernel. The upper half of memory was set aside for
the currently running process.

But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you.

Today's FreeBSD boot loader is 450k. Of course, it can read half a dozen different file systems, supports crypto and has a Lua interpreter. Lua is ~140k of that.

FreeBSD's boot2 program is 16k in size, but can barely read a kernel into memory from a UFS file system and jump to it....

4k words (4608 bytes) for all of unix is impressive...

Warner