Subject: Re: SIOCSIFADDR & co
To: Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios@cs.uni-bonn.de>
From: Ted Lemon <mellon@isc.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 01/27/2000 10:35:50
> When I had access to the VAX room (mind you, not VAX SERVER room, in those
> days they had one big fax and a couple dozen terminals) of the Univ. Bonn
> Physics Dept., some big 36bit DEC was still round. Use up about 10 times
> wall space from what the 11/780 needed.

This is drifting way off the tech-kern topic, so one well-placed flame
will shut me up, *but*...  The 11/780 may have taken up a tenth the
wall space, but it also did a tenth as much...  Less than that.  IIRC,
the DECsystem 20 was a 5 mips machine.  The one at WPI was easily
capable of handling 50 users doing compiles and running emacs, as long
as one of us (me) wasn't rebuilding the C compiler.  A VAX 11/780
couldn't possibly take that load.

Bringing things back to the present, NetBSD now has many of the things
that TOPS-20 had that VMS didn't - e.g., a PMAP JSYS^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
mmap syscall.   It also does some things right that TOPS-20 didn't
(e.g., -lreadline instead of a COMND JSYS).   Of course, -lreadline is
still missing some of the niftier features of the COMND JSYS...

Sigh.

			       _MelloN_