[Beowulf] Re: Religious wars

Perry E. Metzger perry at piermont.com
Wed Jul 23 18:06:03 PDT 2008


"Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> writes:
> Note that Bob and I started out on systems with far less than 100 MB
> of DISK and perhaps a MB of system memory on a fat SERVER in the
> latter 80's.  And the P(o)DP(eople) made do with even less in the
> early 80's.

My first machine was a PDP-8. 4k of 12 bit words of genuine magnetic
core memory, and two DECtape units with some small amount of storage
(I can't remember, but I think it was on the order of 100k). I believe
there are icons on my modern desktop that take up more space than that
whole machine had for core.

> vi back then was little more than a shell on ed IIRC

It was (for nvi, is) the visual mode of ex, which is/was an extended
line editor in the lineage of ed, kind of an extended ed.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com



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