On Sat, 2008-10-25 at 10:30 -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
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It did the job too. It was several years before we upgraded to a S360/50 with 512K (IIRC).
And our Burroughs B-3500 would run circles around the 360/50. The Burroughs had a whopping 200KB of memory, ran an average of 20 jobs in the mix, and didn't require 40 JCL cards to compile and run a one line Hello World FORTRAN program.
Burroughs invented virtual memory in the early 60s in their large systems allowing them to run large programs in small memory. When IBM invented thrashing, called it virtual memory, the minimum memory requirements to run it was 1MB requiring major updgrades to support it. IBM never wrote a line of code that was not designed to sell more hardware.
Bringing this back to Linux, at that time IBM occupied the place of honor that Microsoft has now with an effective monopoly, a cumbersome and inefficient system requiring an army of support people to keep it running, and required constant patching.
Yep. I was very fortunate to have worked in that environment so long. It gave me a very good living because I seemed to have a better than average ability to handle all that stuff. I was one of those that actually read the docs (IBM seemed to be very thorough about that) and could recall/reference many months later the answers to some problem.
Even back then when folks bad-mouthed them, I didn't care. I made good $$, the only criteria that mattered to me then.