From: scj@yaccman.com (scj@yaccman.com)
Subject: [TUHS] Etymology of bc(1)
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 10:12:39 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <5371bd291f9537ed5935435a418bc648.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20140912113612.GN24919@discoboy.drijf.net>
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.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-09-12 17:12 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 25+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-09-12 1:54 Noel Chiappa
2014-09-12 2:35 ` Mark Longridge
2014-09-12 6:00 ` Dave Horsfall
2014-09-12 11:15 ` John Cowan
2014-09-12 11:36 ` Otto Moerbeek
2014-09-12 17:12 ` scj [this message]
2014-09-12 17:18 ` Warner Losh
2014-09-12 19:02 ` Clem Cole
2014-09-12 19:36 ` Dave Horsfall
2014-09-12 20:03 ` Warner Losh
2014-09-12 19:32 ` Dave Horsfall
2014-09-12 18:28 ` Tim Bradshaw
2014-09-13 2:52 ` Dave Horsfall
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2014-09-12 3:15 Noel Chiappa
2014-09-12 3:33 ` Larry McVoy
2014-09-12 6:10 ` Dave Horsfall
2014-09-11 21:24 Christian Neukirchen
2014-09-11 21:41 ` Warner Losh
2014-09-11 22:04 ` Dave Horsfall
2014-09-11 22:17 ` John Cowan
2014-09-11 23:34 ` scj
2014-09-12 1:03 ` Dave Horsfall
2014-09-12 13:37 ` random832
2014-09-12 14:18 ` Steve Nickolas
2014-09-12 20:02 ` Dave Horsfall
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