My point is that bytes mattered. If you could put a year in 2 bytes instead of 4, you did. If you could shrink the TCP header by packing fields, you did. And if you could limit SMTP memory use by specifying a 1000-byte limit, then that's what you did.
Every programmer I know from that era knew how big things were in bytes, because it mattered.
Also, not all PDP-11 systems had VM. And the designers of SMTP certainly did not expect that it would only run on systems with VM.
My point is that bytes mattered. If you could put a year in 2 bytes instead of 4, you did. If you could shrink the TCP header by packing fields, you did. And if you could limit SMTP memory use by specifying a 1000-byte limit, then that's what you did.
Every programmer I know from that era knew how big things were in bytes, because it mattered.
Also, not all PDP-11 systems had VM. And the designers of SMTP certainly did not expect that it would only run on systems with VM.