havarpan

joined 3 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@[email protected]

A nice excerpt (especially the last question) from UNIX: A History and a Memoir, by Brian W. Kernighan (2020).

“As an example of how computing hardware has become cheaper and more powerful over the years, a 1978 PWB paper by Ted Dolotta and Mashey described the development environment, which supported over a thousand users: “By most measures, it is the largest known Unix installation in the world.” It ran on a network of 7 PDP-11’s with a total of 3.3 megabytes of primary memory and 2 gigabytes of disk. That’s about one thousandth of a typical laptop of today. Would your laptop support a population of a million users?”

(million = thousand times thousand)