Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!apple.com!rmh From: rmh@apple.com (Rick Holzgrafe) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Subtantiatng my criticism (again...) [really: VM on PDP 11/70] Message-ID: <3439@internal.Apple.COM> Date: 9 Aug 89 23:39:19 GMT Sender: usenet@Apple.COM Organization: Apple Computer, Inc. Lines: 44 References:<13277@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> <14895@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> In article <14895@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> ari@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Ari Halberstadt) writes: > Seeing as the topic of unix running on tiny machines has come up, > I thought I may as well add my own history to the pot. Well, me too. I started my career on a PDP-11/60 running Unix version 6. Not "System" 6, if there is such a thing: *version* 6, pre-Berkeley and everything. No vi or emacs, not even "more"; just "ed" for editing and reading text files. The PDP had (I think) 256K of "core" (I don't know what the medium really was) and I remember the excitement when we upgraded it to half a Meg. I shared this machine with about two dozen other users (at a time!) for editing, compiling, and assembling. Sometimes it took great patience, but there were benefits: Friday afternoons when the deadlines were upon us and the machine load was highest, it would invariably crash from sheer overwork, and we'd all get an hour or two to sit around and BS while the gurus repaired the file systems by hand. :-) Years of Unix taught me what a good user interface wasn't. I must have built a half-dozen different gadgets intended simply to speed up productivity by streamlining the user interface. One was a "Finder" for Unix, called "vf". People called it a "visual shell" (which it wasn't, really) and nobody called it a Finder since the Mac was not yet even a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye. (And before you ask: no, I'm not claiming to have invented the Finder! It was a *little* like the Mac Finder, without a mouse or graphics, but not much.) And say - any of you Unix hax out there ever use "scan" for reading text files? I wrote it, lavished years of love and creativity on it, made it powerful and robust, made it so that people who used it suddenly found Unix unusable without it - my magnum opus, it was. You know what? Resizable windows with scroll bars made it instantly obsolete. Long live the Mac! ...well, thanks for letting me rock on your porch, suck my teeth, and tell how we traipsed to work through the snow in the good ol' days. I'll shut up and go away now... :-) ========================================================================== Rick Holzgrafe | {sun,voder,nsc,mtxinu,dual}!apple!rmh Software Engineer | AppleLink HOLZGRAFE1 rmh@apple.com Apple Computer, Inc. | "All opinions expressed are mine, and do 20525 Mariani Ave. MS: 27-O | not necessarily represent those of my Cupertino, CA 95014 | employer, Apple Computer Inc."