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."