From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Nov  6 14:36:01 1996
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Subject: Re: SUP on sup.freebsd.org 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 06 Nov 1996 23:09:37 +0100."
             <199611062209.XAA02882@ravenock.cybercity.dk> 
Date: Wed, 06 Nov 1996 14:35:54 -0800
From: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>
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> I'm just getting a litte nervous about all the splendid new stuff
> that we are collecting lately. One of the reasons I _love_ **IX
> and BSD is that they have stayed on the KISS principle for so long.
> As I se our route forward we are rapidly moving away from that
> philosofi, and I think that is a shame. If I want big and overengineered
> systems I get plenty at work form using Billyboys systems there
> (allthough we are a UNIX shop :(   )

An amusing anecdote:  I remember sitting around over lunch one day
with a small group of guys, all of them smart, modern fellows and
capable programmers.  This was around 1979 or 1980.  We spent the
entire lunch debating, heatedly and in all seriousness, the following
proposition:

    Any software task that is worth doing can be done reasonably on a
    split I/D PDP-11.

(That's 64K each of code and data, for those of you who don't remember.)

The arguments stay the same, only the numbers change. :-)

John