[Info-vax] OT: obscure PDP11 OSes (even more dinosaury)

[David Froble]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <mlouja$7aj$2 at dont-email.me>,
> 	Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>> On 2015-06-15, Dirk Munk <munk at home.nl> wrote:
>>> The PDP-11 was a 16 bit architecture. Writing larger programs on a 
>>> PDP-11 always involved using overlay. I've spend many hours trying to 
>>> construct my Cobol programs in such a way that I could use memory 
>>> resident overlay. Otherwise it would become disk-resident overlay, and 
>>> that involved lots of extra disk IO as the name suggests. That would 
>>> make an application a lot slower. Using RMS in supervisor mode also was 
>>> a must to keep a somewhat fast application.
>>>
>> The TKB overlay functionality (and it's associated documentation) is
>> something I have _very_ gladly left in the past and have almost
>> successfully purged from my memory. :-)
>>
> 
> Having spent the least of my PDP-11 time on RSX I can't say how hard
> it was to use TKB but I do overlays on Ultrix-11 and have never found
> it particularly difficult.
> 
> bill
> 

It's not that it is so difficult, the real issue to me is that it 
dictates how you design and write code.  This then restricts your options.

While I'll admit that such restrictions can have some beneficial side 
effects, they are still restrictions, and such is counter-productive.

I had a rather old application that had a separate sub-program for just 
about every action.  Each prompt for input was a sub-program.  It was 
much more work.

Now, I still have a fondness for modular coding, and for library(s) of 
support routines.  Just seems to me to be a better method.  Not sure how 
much of that came from a history with TKB.