24 Mar
2025
24 Mar
'25
10:27 a.m.
On Mon, 24 Mar 2025 08:59:34 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'You'd wonder how rogue processes could be prevented from stomping on each other in such systems when neither the Intel 8086/8088 nor the IBM PC nor the PC/XT had a memory management unit, and the answer was not to try and just hope for the best.'
Most of the PDP-11 family (apart from the earliest/lowest-end models) had memory management support. It was pretty basic for its time, but remember, this is the hardware on which Unix originated in the first place.
The blogger even found a 1989 log for the computer's one and only guest login session — which seems to consist entirely of someone named tom trying to exit vi.
Why do I suspect a fake ... ?