4 Jun
2009
4 Jun
'09
4:23 p.m.
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 12:12 PM, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
I've only ever run Unix on a PDP-11 as a single-user, but I'm not
surprised to hear it.
So that's
why _I_ would run BSD on a PDP-11.
All I remember about Unix on a PDP-11 is that it was painfully slow. At school, we had a PDP-11/70 (DECsystem 570, I think)
that was almost
universally hated. It was replaced by a fairly small AT&T 3B machine,
which was not as painfully slow.
I am not sure why the machines were real turtles, as there were never
more than perhaps 10 users on at a time.
I'd have to wonder if the machine was swapping, or if it was just
CPU-bound. Depending on what those 10 users were doing, that could be
quite a lot. 4MB should be plenty of memory for a number of users
(since each process is essentially limited to 128K total I&D space),
but if everyone was trying to compile something at the same time, I
can easily see how individual response would be poor.
-ethan