RSX11M - Dave Cutler
Anyone who read the RSX11M sources (driver writers especially) realised that Dave Cutler was a very very good programmer long before he worked on VMS and later Windows NT. He managed to get a multiuser protected general purpose operating system to work with a minimum memory footprint of under 32kbytes on machines with about the same CPU power as the chip on a credit card. (A 96kByte PDP 11/40 (1/3 mip) with 2 RK05 disks (2.4Mbyte each) could support 2 concurrent programmers - a PDP 11/70 (1 mip) with 1Mbyte and 2 RM03 disk packs (65Mbyte each) could support 10 or more.) During the many years that the CEGB used PDP-11 computers with RSX11M, I did not hear of a single OS failure that was not caused by a hardware fault - I wish that current systems were as good. //

Wednesday 19th June 2013 15:09 GMT
annodomini2
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FAIL
Re: there are alternatives
They would never redesign the system, if the system has issues, they are known and fixes are well known.

Changing the system design introduces potential risks and unknowns into the system.

It's not about Zero failure, it's about safe and predictable failure. //

Wednesday 19th June 2013 07:53 GMT
Bob Dunlop
Hey I was taught assembler programming using a pdp11 .

After it's nice clean structure, the mess that was 8086 code came as quite a shock.