On Sat, Oct 25, 2008, William L. Maltby wrote:
>
>On Sat, 2008-10-25 at 10:17 -0500, David G. Mackay wrote:
>> <snip>
>
>> Then came CANDE, TD8xx terminals, and editing on your head-per-track
>> disk. Ah for the good old days, when men were men, and memory upgrades
>> involved fork lifts.
>I tried to stay out of this thread, I really did. But the "forklift"
>reference hooked me.
>
>Circa 1971/2(?), we had an IBM S360/30 with 64K (that's right, "K", "M")
>bytes of "core" (back then, no simms, dimms, ...). Running IBM DOS, we
>had three partitons going, 1 bg, 2 fg. It was decided that an
>aftermarket upgrade would allow us to consolidate the two foreground
>functions into one and use two background partitions for batch
>production processing.
>
>The aftermarket expansion was bought and took us up to a "whopping" 96KB
>of "core" memory. The expansion unit (best I can recall) was about 5.5'
>x 8' x 3', or 132 cubic feet. 8-O
>
>Anyway, a forklift took it off the truck. And large hand pallet jack was
>used to roll it across the raised flooring.
>
>It did the job too. It was several years before we upgraded to a S360/50
>with 512K (IIRC).
And our Burroughs B-3500 would run circles around the 360/50.
The Burroughs had a whopping 200KB of memory, ran an average of
20 jobs in the mix, and didn't require 40 JCL cards to compile
and run a one line Hello World FORTRAN program.
Burroughs invented virtual memory in the early 60s in their large
systems allowing them to run large programs in small memory.
When IBM invented thrashing, called it virtual memory, the
minimum memory requirements to run it was 1MB requiring major
updgrades to support it. IBM never wrote a line of code that
was not designed to sell more hardware.
Bringing this back to Linux, at that time IBM occupied the place
of honor that Microsoft has now with an effective monopoly, a
cumbersome and inefficient system requiring an army of support
people to keep it running, and required constant patching.
Bill
--
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