On Sat, 15 Apr 2000, Jerry Callen wrote:
> It's hard to remember just how dear main memory was before the advent
> of DRAM.
Remember? That was rather before my time. ;-)
Seriously, there is a quote from Fred Brooks's timeless "The Mythical
Man-Month" that has done more to put all of that into perspective for me then
anything else. He is talking about how the designers of OS/360
over-engineered things, wasting machine resources:
For example, OS/360 devotes 26 bytes of the permanently
resident date-turnover routine to the proper handling of
December 31 on leap years (when it is Day 366). That might
have been left to the operator.
The fact that deliberately not handling dates correctly in order to save
twenty-six bytes of memory could even be *considered*, let alone
*recommended*, really gives one an idea of just how precious memory was back
then.
(As an aside: I highly recommend "The Mythical Man-Month" to anyone
involved in technology production in any way. The same mistakes that we moan
about today are the exact same mistakes that were being made back in the
1960s. Fred Brooks's warnings have gone largely ignored by Management(TM) for
over 25 years.)
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| "The memory management on the Power PC chip is something that should be |
| shown to small children when they've been especially bad." -- Linus |
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