[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Paper

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 4:30 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Feb 2018, Warren Toomey wrote:
>
> All, my journal paper on PDP-7 Unix has just been licensed under CC-BY-SA,
>> so here's a link to the PDF version:
>>
>
> Wow!
>
> I'm still astonished at the constraints those guys had to suffer:
>
>     PDP-7 Unix provided a multitasking environment by dividing the 8K
>     words of memory into two halves.  The lower half of memory was
>     reserved for the kernel.  The upper half of memory was set aside for
>     the currently running process.
>
> But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe
> you.


Today's FreeBSD boot loader is 450k. Of course, it can read half a dozen
different file systems, supports crypto and has a Lua interpreter. Lua is
~140k of that.

FreeBSD's boot2 program is 16k in size, but can barely read a kernel into
memory from a UFS file system and jump to it....

4k words (4608 bytes) for all of unix is impressive...

Warner
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