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[William Donzelli]

> 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.

TSS/8 is also a good example.

> 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.

I do not think that is a good idea. It is the best way for a computer
architect to paint himself into a corner, often with horrible results.
Any long term planning absolutely must include places for expansion,
simply because every computer system gets more complex with time -
bloat, as many call it. Yes, you can set the boundaries of the kernel
in stone, and stick new developments outside the boundaries as
bags-on-the-side, but eventually things will get ugly and drag
everything down. Look what happened to CDC Cybers or DEC PDP-10s - too
much of the architectures hit their limits, with the end results being
ugly things like Cyber 180s and Jupiters (almost).

--
Will