On Sat, 2008-10-25 at 10:30 -0700, Bill Campbell wrote: > <snip> > > > >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. -- Bill (the other one)