[TUHS] PDP-7 Unix Paper

Donald ODona mutiny.mutiny at india.com
Wed Feb 14 19:18:58 AEST 2018


already 20 years ago I met a guy (masters degree, university) who never freed dynamically allocated memory. He told me he is 'instantiating a object', but had no idea what an heap is, and what dynamically allocated memory means.

At 14 Feb 2018 02:23:07 +0000 (+00:00) from Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com>:
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 10:30:52AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Don't even get me started.  Young people think that a VM is a server.
> I wrote a microbenchmark suite, lmbench, and I get people sending me
> email that they get inconsistent results on their VM.
> 
> The lack of knowledge that would make someone ask about that is stunning.



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