news.software.readers

On 7/29/2007, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz posted this:
> In < @ >, on 07/28/2007
> at 07:12 PM, Gene E. Bloch said:
>
>> I remember a co-worker in the late 60's going through his code with a
>> fine-tooth comb looking for ways to trim a few bytes (words?) of
>> code and data here and there so he could add some function or other
>> to his (assembly language) program, which was running on a PDP-8.
>
> Remember that the PDP-8 was a minicomputer, perhaps the smallest
> machine on the market at the time. Such contemporaneous machines as
> the Bendix G-20, CDC 1604, GE 625, H800, IBM 7094, PDP-6, Philcon
> S2000, RCA 3301 and UNIVAC 1107 had far more[1] memory. Not that we
> didn't try to shave storage requirements on those as well.

Understand that the poor guy had to solve his problem on the PDP-8, not
any of the other machines, because that's what his project involved and
what was available to him in the lab...

>> I don't wish to go back to those days :-)
>
> The good old days reeked, for the most part.
>
> [1] But still tiny by today's standards.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
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