Re: [comphist] Lost arts from the 8 bit days.

[Patrick O'C. <po...@us...>]

Rob Landley wrote:

>One advantage of the 8 bits is there wasn't enough space to get truly lost.  
>No mater how intricate, non-obvious, or obfuscated, it was still 64k of ram, 
>and you could read through the whole thing from start to finish, in hex, in a 
>couple hours.  Maintainability pretty much took care of itself.
>
If I may pick a nit: 64k corresponds to a 16-bit address space. Whether 
the machine is
what was usually called 8-bit or 16-bit is neither here nor there in 
this regard. A PDP-11
(without the MMU) could only address 64kb of memory and early versions 
of Unix
actually ran on such things. I vividly remember spending rather more 
than a couple of
hours debugging device drivers, and that wasn't even in hex :-)

poc