[r-t] Exhausted search spaces

[David Sullivan]

RAS:
>But I cannot believe that this was done "many years ago" and 
>the suggestion that the results were printed out is clearly 
>wrong. 

Yes. This was over thirty years ago and my memory of the exact wording
is obviously hazy. Thinking about it, the program was set to run direct
to the line printer from an ICL mainframe. When he ran the PB6 run
the line printer thundered into action and he watched it aghast for a second
or two before aborting the program in some way. I don't remember
if he could run the program and save the output to disk, but given the
computer speeds of the time it would probably be still running.

ISTR him saying that the first extent that was produced started with
5 homes, the program presumably being written to favour plain leads
over calls. He was rather pleased to announce that the real basic 
extent of PB6 was this one, starting with 5 homes followed by a 
nightmarish mishmash of pseudo-random plains, bobs and singles.

Dave