On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 17:30 -0500, William Ballard wrote: > On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 04:12:14PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: > > 2) Macintosh excepted, but it had it's own problems: the geniuses > > who wrote it had to be brilliant to squeeze all that greatness into > > a 64KB ROM, and the hacks they had to do mad it difficult to make > > multi-finder, do protected multi-tasking, and port the s/w to Power. > > Reminds of the old farts who used to tell me how they'd fit 100 people > onto a system with 256K of memory. Each client would get allocated 2K. > :-) I'm one of those old farts. My 1st job was as a mainframe COBOL programmer. The machine, an Amdahl PCM of an IBM 4030, had a 1.6 MIPS CPU and 6MB RAM, but yet supported ~75 on-line users plus 10 batch queue slots. Pretty amazing. The way it did it, of course, was that IBM pushed a lot of the work out towards the edge: FEPs (front-end processors) handled the incoming data from smart block-mode terminals, and the disk and tape controllers (boxes 1/2 the size of the main box) had their own intelligence. And, of course, CICS allowed the application to "forget about" a user until s/he pressed the XMIT key. None of this the-main-CPU-handles-every-keystroke-from-every-terminal stuff that saps the resources of interactive systems like Unix & VMS. IBM knew what it wanted to do: build fast transaction-processing systems, and it did a great job of it. Programming it was a true pain in the fscking a**, though. Blech! -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson, LA USA PGP Key ID 8834C06B I prefer encrypted mail. GGLX : Gnome GNU Linux X.Org
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part