Back in the '70s I was part of a group that spec'ed out a replacement mainframe. $1 million dollars for each MB of ram. That was when a million was a lot of money. Programmers cost about $14,000 a year. Got two bits unused in your data structure? Make them flag bits. And, of course, the high order byte of every 24 bit address was subject to being used. Mainframer's have been concerned about memory ever since. Even now, with $7,000 / GB of memory (list price) on a z9 BC, (in units of 8 GB). Still too expensive to waste like we do with PC memory. Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting
>>> Nick Laflamme <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 3/9/2007 10:21 AM >>> Jeff Henry wrote: > On 3/9/07, *Mike Walter* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: > > ... and IBM has better things to work on than something 35 years > from now, ... > > > That's what everybody was saying back in 1965 about the y2k problem. :-) > And because they said that, them mainframe thingies caught on! There was a reason they were so tight with those extra bytes for the "19" way back then! It might have had consequence, but I'm not sure it was the wrong choice _at the time_.
