9 Jul
2014
9 Jul
'14
9:40 a.m.
On 07/09/2014 09:07 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
128 kB is enough for OS/360 PCP ? we ran that in
college on our Model
44. Not clear what that gets you beyond DOS. Perhaps applications?
We had a pile of PL/1 code, also WATFIV.
I seem to recall that the smallest variant of DOS/360 was a 4KB
resident, but 8KB was more the rule. Lots and lots of transient phases
loaded to do anything meaningful; e.g., $$BOPEN just to open a file--no
permanently resident code for that.
And people think that CP/M had modest storage requirements. I recall
that COBOL and PL/I both took forever to compile. If you wanted to
assemble a program with a bunch of I/O macros, that also seemed to take
forever. On the other hand, using the small FORTRAN compiler (USA Basic
FORTRAN) was pretty zippy.
128KB on DOS/360 would get you a sizeable background partition and two
foreground ones. You could use the foreground ones for running
interactive timesharing applications. Several universities did just
that, hooking TTY dialins for running BASIC interactively.
--Chuck