In the early 80s I was the system admin on a VAX used for pipeline SCADA. Earlier I did PDP-11s and went through 3 upgrades before the VAX. We had one of the first operating real time systems written in C. It was amazing how well it worked with minimum ram, hard drive and cpu horsepower by todays standards doing graphical displays, data acquisition over 6 phone lines and all. Interesting thing was I found out about memory leakage with C. You had to reboot the system about once a month to keep the speed up. We still have the same bloody problem 25 years later. So much for progress.
Spam was something you ate at 3:00 AM when troubleshooting/debugging an upgrade. This was in addition to cold beenie-weinies, oatmeal cookies, nachoes, cold pizza, and gallons of coke. Jungle Lunch!!!!!