12 Sep
2014
12 Sep
'14
7:12 p.m.
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...
Steve
> Dave Horsfall scripsit:
>
> > Perhaps so, but I was a bit surprised that FreeBSD (and I include the
> Mac
> > in that) totally rewrote it from a Posix draft, and dropped the pipe.
>
> So did GNU.