From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: imp@bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:18:13 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Etymology of bc(1) In-Reply-To: <5371bd291f9537ed5935435a418bc648.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> References: <20140912015415.DB69E18C09E@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20140912111512.GA14385@mercury.ccil.org> <20140912113612.GN24919@discoboy.drijf.net> <5371bd291f9537ed5935435a418bc648.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> Message-ID: <09F72555-089F-4BC4-A602-93CC5B51F0B0@bsdimp.com> On Sep 12, 2014, at 11:12 AM, scj at yaccman.com wrote: > 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... Sure beat the heck out of trying to get overlays right. I remember “fondly” trying to get the overlay layout manager working to get the FORTRAN programs I was writing at the time to fit into 64k (or was it 48k). Switching from the PDP-11 to the VAX was a godsend and all that moved into the kernel and got way simpler from the user perspective… Warner -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 842 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: