Re: [TUHS] SDB debugger

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Sat, May 02, 2020 at 10:21:04PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
> I wish it was as easy for others to have such
> satisfaction these days.

Amen to that.  I think we all lived, you Bell Labs people especially,
in a simpler time.  We were trying to fit into 64K, split I/D 128K,
my Z80 was 64K but some extra for graphics, then the VAX came and we
were trying for 1MB, Suns with 4MB.

So small mattered a lot and that meant the Unix philosophy of do one
thing and do it well worked quite nicely.

What that also meant, to people coming on a little bit after, was that
it was relatively easy to modify stuff, the stuff was not that complex.

Even I had an easy time, my prime was back at Sun when SunOS was a
uniprocessor OS.  That is dramatically simpler than a fully threaded
SMP OS that has support for TCP offloading, NUMA, etc, etc.

I really don't know how systems people do it these days, it is a
much more complex world.

So I'm with Norm, it was fun back in the day to be able to come in
and have a big impact.  I too wish that it was as easy for young
people to come in and have that impact.  I've done that and it was
awesome, these days, I have no idea how I'd make a difference.

--lm