On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 4:14 PM Noel Chiappa wrote: > Ahem. Lots more _core_. People keeep forgetting that we're looking at > decicions made at a time when each bit in main memory was stored in a > physically separate storage device, and having tons of memory was a dream > of > the future. > Yeah -- that is something that forgotten. There's a kit/hackday project to make 32-byte core for an Arduino I did with some of my boy scouts doing electronic MB a while back just to try to give them a feel what a 'bit' was. Similarly, there was a update of in late 1960's children's book originally called 'A Million' it's now called: A Million Dots Each page has 10K dots. The idea is to help young readers get a real feel for what 'a million' means visually. > > E.g. the -11/40 I first ran Unix on had _48 KB_ of core memory - total! > And that had to hold the resident OS, plus the application! It's no > surprise that Unix was so focused on small size - and as a corollary, on > high bang/buck ratio.' Amen -- I ran an 11/34 with 64K under V6 for about 3-6 months while we were awaiting the 256K memory upgrade. > > > But even in his age of lighting one's cigars with gigabytes of main memory > (literally), small is still beautiful, because it's easier to understand, > and > complexity is bad. So it's too bad Unix has lost that extreme parsimony. > Yep -- I think we were discussing this last week WRT to cat -v/fmt et al. I fear some people confuse 'progress' with 'feature creep.' Just because we can do something, does not mean we should. As I said, I'm a real fan of async I/O and like Paul, feel that it is a 'better' primitive. But I fully understand and accept, that given the tradeoffs of the time, UNIX did really well and I much prefer what we got than the alternative. I'm happy we ended up with simply and just works.