Incidentally, a quick quiz. Assuming all the virtual
address space was
physical memory and you wanted to make a copy onto a disk drive
(32 Trillion Bytes - we didn't even have GigaBytes back in 1972, let
alone
TeraBytes), how long would a sustained WRITE at 1
MByte/second take?
Hint: Answer should be in ONE digit of precision along with a time
interval.
Eager beavers who want to give us 8 significant
figures of precision
are disqualified.
Just over 1 year
Just under 400 days
Quite a bit under 60 weeks
Just under 13 months ... oops, that was 2 sig. figs. Rather more than 10
months then.
If you want even sillier units, and at the risk of reviving an off-topic
debate, rather more than 30 megaseconds.
Could these disks do a megabyte per second in 1972? Sounds rather fast to
me...
Philip.