| My memory of the PDP-11 is different.
However, the pdp11 is/was a weird collection of systems, from tiny little single chip implementations to run a VAX console, upto large racks of boards to make up a cpu and fpu like the 11/70.
I mainly worked on 11/44's an 11/73's which both shared a 16bit paged address space, (with no cache that I remember). They had more physical memory (256k and I think 4M) than could be addressed by the instructions(64k). The pages where 8k - so eight of them, and waving them around required an OS mapping function call. The IO controllers where asynchronous, and the OS did preemptive multiprocessing and the problem-space was larger than 64k, and faster than the disk-drive, so multi-processing and locks where required to address it. We used C and assembler on them. C was nicer than assembler to work with. I don't see a difference of-kind between the pdp-11 and current computers.
I do see a difference of 'know-ability' of the software stack that makes up a system. There are so many external dependencies in the systems I have worked on since, many of them larger than the systems that loaded into that pdp-11, so being certain that there is no fault was almost always a pipe-dream. Automated tests helped - somewhat. Often, confidence is based on the 'trajectory' of the rate of bugs discovered. |