[CentOS] Re: Ole Fossils [ was Re: ls and rm: "argument list too long"]

[David G. Mackay]

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