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Comment by ConradHex | Hacker News Reader

>The unix text utilities were written in the 60's and 70's when computers were 33mhz and had 5MB of ram.

I'm not positive (I was born in the 70s), but I'm pretty sure they had less RAM and speed than this.

Yep. Unix was written on a PDP-7 http://www.linfo.org/pdp-7.html -- probably with 8,000 or 16,000 words of memory (18 bit words), probably running on the order of several thousand instructions per second

My 1990's Amiga 1200 had 14 MHz and 2-8 MB ram, so you're off by 20-30 years :-)

Yeah, my first non-commodore computer was a blazing fast 33MHz 386 with 4MB RAM -- 1991 (~$3,400 by the way)

Damn, do I feel spoiled watching a modest app compile in a few seconds today!

The very first computer I saw Unix on was a minicomputer/workstation in 1985. It had a 68020 processor running at 20 mhz, and had 4mb of RAM. It cost around $75k.

The first one I saw (not used - the first one I used was a 680x0 box) was a Z-80 based Cromemco monster running Cromix on less than 512K.

Unix can be really small, if we sacrifice some stuff.

I thought we were making the point that hardware was slow and expensive much later than the 60s and 70s, not that Unix could be really small.

I was making the point that even a lowly hare-brained 8-bit processor can run a Unix-like OS.

IIRC, my first unix machine was a 16 MHz 68020 with about a megabyte of RAM and about 200 MB of fixed disk storage.

It served around 40 terminals.

The Amiga 500 came in the late 80s and had a 7.14Mhz CPU and 512kb of RAM, and it was considered awesome... So yeah.

So much misinformation indeed! One reason, out of many, of course, that I stopped reading Slashdot was the amount of misinformation propagated there. I was afraid that I would read something false while in an insufficiently wary frame of mind and believe it. I'd hate to see the same start to happen here.

What are you talking about?

People shooting off things like "The unix text utilities were written in the 60's and 70's when computers were 33mhz and had 5MB of ram." as though they were fact.

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