>How many disk swaps to do a Pascal compile?
None, if you have two floppies. Could you get a hard derive for that puppy?
Yeah, they had a 5MB hard drive... I think it sold for $799.
I was recalling a Pascal compiler, developed at UCSD in the seventies. As compilers usually are, this one was organized into phases, in which the output of one phase was the input to the next. Since the compiler was quite large, and the floppies only held 140K, they divided the phases across multiple floppies, which you needed to load in sequence to complete a compile. One minor mercy: if your program contained syntax errors, the first phase would find them, so you didn't have to go through the whole procedure.
Could you get a hard derive for that puppy?
They did introduce a hard drive before the product's end of life, but it only held five meg or so.