4 ms·
The article quotes the model of the first (rather than 0th) edition system as a PDP-11/20; which the architecture page on Wikipedia says: "So originally, a full
by mjevans 5y ago
The article quotes the model of the first (rather than 0th) edition system as a PDP-11/20; which the architecture page on Wikipedia says: "So originally, a fully expanded PDP-11 had 28K words, or 56 kbytes in modern terms."
28K instructions / data ops for the 'OS' and all guest programs, with 4K words (also 16 bit) of memory mapped IO / device registers.
It's clear the entire system would have been constructed in what today might be thought of as a 'Minimum Viable Product' format. Powerful functions and operations, but focused on a very narrow tolerance for inputs. The intelligence of even 'dumb' terminals makes a ton of sense and this gives me a greater perspective of the relative power required for early laser printers (rasterizing vector graphics on the fly) in the 80s.