Two Programmers

17th June 1991

The two programmers have just finished eating a massive pizza. They sit back contentedly, patting their stomachs.

Mike1

Who'd have thought, five year ago, we'd be sitting here eating L. S. Grunts' extra-massive pepperoni pizza?

Mike2

Aye, and with ten Megaflops of raw CPU power to get back to after lunch, on a SPARC machine with 8 Meg of core, and a gigabyte of disk hanging off it.

Mike1

'Course, back in the old days, we had to make do with 68010 machines. We were grateful to have a single megabyte in those days. Three 'undred K of disk cache, we had ... But we were 'appy, though we were poor.

Mike2

'Appy because we were poor! Remember when we used to run twenty-four terminals off the Bleasdale? That machine serviced the whole office -- development, administration, documentation ... the lot!

Mike1

Aye. I remember back when we first got the Bleasdale, before we upgraded its CPU and operating system. Running version seven, it were: used to crawl along like a tortoise. But it were like 'eaven to us.

Mike2

'Course, I always say Unix started going downhill with version seven.

Mike1

Yes, you do. Frequently.

Mike2

I remember good old ``sixth edition'' days when there were no environment, and mkdir was setuid root, and the shell's goto and if were user programs.

Mike1

'Course, back when I were just starting out in computers, the kernel were just an ordinary user process. When wanted to alter anything, we just fired up a debugger and twiddled the bits.

Mike2

Machine-level debugger?

Mike1

Aye. We didn't have them new-fangled source debuggers back in them days!

Mike2

You were lucky! We used to dream of 'aving a machine-level debugger. When we wanted to patch the kernel, we 'ad to od a hardcopy of /dev/kmem, work out the offsets of the words we wanted to change, and dd seek=In them back in.

Mike1

/dev/kmem! Luxury! We used to dream of 'aving a software interface to the kernel! In my day, the kernel were 'ard-wired on t'motherboard, and we 'ad to manipulate the words wi' tweezers when we wanted to change anything.

Mike2

Sixteen-bit words?

Mike1

Nay lad, ten-bit words!

Mike2

Ah, what we would have given for a machine wi' ten bit words! We used to run our whole office on a PDP-0 with 4k words of core, and only four bits in each word. All we 'ad for secondary storage was a paper tape puncher left over from the Crimean war.

Mike1

'Course back in the really early days, we 'ad to make do wi' a PDP -1. It 'ad twenty-seven 1-bit words and no peripheral devices at all. There were no way to do input or output, and when we wanted persistent storage, we 'ad to measure the state of the bits with a multimeter and write 'em down on a bit of paper. And ballpoint pens 'adn't been invented back then, so we 'ad to write everything in charcoal on papyrus.

Mike2

Right. [Visibly prepares his next speech] We 'ad to run the whole of Index+ on a machine so amazingly primitive that it had an addressable memory of 640k and a segmented architecture that prevented any C object from being larger than 64k. It ran an operating system so flaky that the programs -- or rather, some of the programs -- did their own filename-expansion, in subtly incompatible ways. There were no hardware protection, so any misdirected pointer indirection could scribble all over the operating system. The biggest disk partition it could handle were 32 Meg.

And even when we got a similar but updated machine with 32 Meg of core and a gigabyte of disk, and a '486 CPU that outperformed our main office machine by a factor of ten, it were emulating the primitive one, because that's what the users wanted! And that were in the 1990s!

Mike1

Oh, come off it! No-one would be gullible enough to believe that!

Author's Note

OK, I admit that this is a very obvious rip-off of the Monty Python sketch in which four Yorkshiremen look back on their childhoods, and progressively exaggerate the hardships that they and their families had to undergo. I'm sure they won't sue.

Since I wrote this sketch (seven years ago as I write), hardware has of course continued to leap ahead in massive bounds, so that the super-machine described in the final paragraph now sounds very mundane. Ah well, that's the price of progress.