>>>> It still somewhat blows my mind that you could do anything useful with
>>>> so little memory. Presumably for processing large datasets, most of
>>>> the data at any one time would be in secondary storage?
>>> Large datasets then were also very tiny compared to large datasets of
>>> today. :)
>> Sure. But 1MB is such a tiny amount of memory, it could only hold a few
>> thousand records (depending on their size). It would almost be faster to
>> process them by hand then go to all the trouble of punching cards and
>> feeding them through a computer. So it must have been possible to
>> process larger datasets than that somehow.
> 
> You never read the entire dataset into memory. You process it a record at a
> time.

Right. That's what I figured.

> The only limit on file size is the media, not memory.  There is no difference in
> memory consumption between processing 10 records or 10 million records.

If you're trying to, say, sort data into ascending order, how do you do 
that? A bubble sort? (Requires two records in memory at once - but, more 
importantly, requires rewritable secondary storage.)

-- 
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