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[Chuck Guzis]

I'm trying to remember--the smallest DOS/360 memory footprint was what, 8K?
 16K?  Whatever, it wasn't much to support 1 background and 2 foreground
partitions.  Lots and lots of supervisior transient "phases" of course,
read in from disk, but still it was impressive what could be done in a
small amount of memory.  Almost makes CP/M seem bloated by comparison.

I recall that when Neil Lincoln was working on a proposal for a
supercomputer for NASA Ames (IIRC he called it his Super-X-by-God) back in
the 1970's, , he solemnly informed me that the OS would be segregated in
its own dedicated memory--all 16K of it.  Now, that was 16K 64-bit words
and I assume that most of the job control and slower I/O tasks would be
handled by other machines, but to me it represented a line drawn in the
sand.  I've always thought it a pity that other manufacturers didn't follow
his lead and legislate in hardware the size of the OS kernel.

Cheers,
Chuck