[TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Sat Jun 30 04:01:09 AEST 2018


> You don't remember that you've known me for thirty years or so?
> 
> Hell, you used to help me out. Viktor and I and a couple of other
> people built the predecessor of Jumpstart at Lehman Brothers like 25
> years ago, it was called PARIS, and you were the one who did stuff
> like telling us the secret IOCTL to to turn off sync FFS metadata
> writes in SunOS so we could saturate our disk controllers during
> installs. (I guess it wasn't that secret but it was a big help, we got
> the bottleneck down to being network bandwidth and could install a
> single workstation from "boot net" to ready for the trader in five
> minutes.)

Heh, check this out:

$ call Viktor
Viktor Dukhovni                 718-754-2126 (W/Morgan Stanley)

Sorry Perry, I had completely forgotten about all that stuff.  Now that
you mention it, I do remember your install stuff, it was very cool.
But I'm horrible with names, when I was teaching at Stanford I'd have
students come up to me from a couple of semesters ago and I'd have no
idea what their names were.  Sorry about that.

> Anyway, I've also been doing this for quite a while. Not as long as
> many people here, I'm way younger than the people who were hacking in
> the 1960s on IBM 360s (I was learning things like reading back then,
> not computer science), but my first machine was a PDP-8e with an
> ASR-33 teletype.

Well welcome to the old farts club, I'll cut you some slack :)
I still think you are missing the point I was trying to make,
it's amusing, a bit, that you are preaching what you are to me
as a guy who moved Sun in that direction.  I'm not at all against
your arguments, I was just making a different point.



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