Donation - old mainframe Unix system

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Tue Dec 2 14:28:00 1997

<>Funny... My CoCo can support multiple users, and it wasn't expensive at
<>all... $xxx for the machine, $yyy for the floppy drive, $zzz for OS-9 =

And the point was...

I made a subtle point that the older and often smaller machines were not
short on capability and also didn't lack for understandability.

The later is significant. Far to many of the wintel boxen are undocumented
kluges running a million or more lines of incomprehensable code that
sometimes works. After that programming something like PDP-8 with it's
smaller memory and very small instruction set suggest getting to the
concise solution was essential. Same so for the early micros were 64k
of ram and an instruction set that could be remembered.

Often the only difference was speed.

Allison
Received on Tue Dec 02 1997 - 14:28:00 GMT

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