Magazine retrospectives

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_crl.com>
Date: Sat May 17 02:41:26 1997

On Fri, 16 May 1997, Captain Napalm wrote:

> I remember in 1985 or 86, programming my Coco (with 64K of RAM - upgraded
> myself from 16K) to do a 6-bit sound sample. I could get a reconizable
> sample of 30 seconds (each sample took 32k), and only reconizable because I
> knew what to listen for. A decent sample lasted only 2 or 3 seconds.

HA! I could do 40 seconds in 48K on my Apple ][+ at 1-bit and it was
pretty legible. Didn't need no silly pentium and EDO memory for that.
If I sampled it into my 1 meg RAM card on my //e I could get five
(count'em FIVE) whole minutes!

>
> Still though, that doesn't excuse the bloat of today's operating systems.
> Just wished that the operating systems could reside in under 64K (actually,
> the kernel for QNX on a Pentium weighs in under 10K).

I believe it's around 4K. And they have an impressive micro-GUI called
Photon which operates in under a meg. It easily compares to Windows.

I used to run my linux box on 4megs. Worked fine (with a decent swap
space). There's no need for the bloat which windows and its ilk covets.
What next? A 500meg operating system?

The Apple disk conrtoller ROM which read the boot sector off of a disk
was 256 bytes! Amazing piece of code. You won't find anything
comparable today, at least in any mainstream software (ie. windows).

Sam
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Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass
Received on Sat May 17 1997 - 02:41:26 BST