procrastination diagram

An old chestnut that I am fond of digging up from the vax 4.3bsd sys/vmparam.h:

 * Just for fun: current memory prices are 4600$ a megabyte on VAX (4/22/81),
 * so we loan each swapped in process memory worth 100$, or just admit
 * that we don't consider it worthwhile and swap it out to disk which costs
 * $30/mb or about $0.75.

Memory for a Mac Pro ("expensive" ECC, registered) cost $.04/MB last month.

A cheap WD 1TB disk cost $.00006/MB two weeks later.

Old memory-to-disk cost ratio: 153:1; currently 724:1 for admittedly somewhat expensive memory.

But someone put all of James Burke's TV programs on the web so I've been watching television instead of blogging.

Seem to be a series of articles on a design patterns and anti-patterns in historical Unix, by Neil Brown, called "Ghosts of Unix Past":

• Full Exploitation
• Conflated Designs
• Unfixable Designs
• High-maintenance Designs

Now, many of the things mentioned here I'm not sure count as "historical Unix" but that may just be a(nother) sign that I'm getting old. Still definitely worth the read.

In the historical UNIX vein, someone ported 7th edition Unix to the Intel platform (It has at least a couple of 2BSDisms, judging by the documentation but I haven't investigated further).

I have a feeling there was something else, but I can't come up with it right now.