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