in 340625 20080402 094139 "Hendrik van Rooyen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >John J. Lee wrote: > >>How did programmers manage back then in 32k? > >Some of the answers, in no particular sequence, are: > >Tight, small operating systems that did the minimum.
Apart from the GUI stuff, mainframe operating systems did everything that today's x86 OSs do. Early releases of IBM's OS/360 could run in 64KB and offered Fortran, Cobol etc The task time-sharing on release 12 (MVT, about 1971) was better than that in Windows XP or Vista (that should start a few arguments). >Assembler. >Sequential Processing: >- small tasks with multiple passes on tape >( like the concept of Unix pipes ) >Overlays. >Character based menu systems. >No OO. >Code structured to the point of incomprehensibility: >- if ten or so instructions looked similar, >you forced calls instead of inlining. I think you have that back-to-front - it is unstructured code with lots of inlining which is incomprehensible. >Procedural languages, close to the metal. >Small, fixed length, fixed type character based data structures. > >Some of the other veterans may want to add to this list. > >- Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
