On Sat, 2008-10-25 at 10:30 -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
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.
The good old Master Control Program at work.
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.
Of course, there was the time that the large systems group put the segment-not-present handler in an overlayable segment. The good folks at the factory had machines with max memory, so it wasn't a problem for them. It was a nice hard hang for those that didn't have enough memory.
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.
Yes, but at least IBM tested their equipment, and HAD sufficient support folks. I used to work for Burroughs, and that was a source of frustration for all concerned.
Dave