Magazine retrospectives

From: Captain Napalm <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Sat May 17 11:05:13 1997

It was thus said that the Great Sam Ismail once stated:
>
> On Fri, 16 May 1997, Captain Napalm wrote:
>
> >
> > 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?
>
  Which version of Linux were you running? Sounds like either the 0.9x
series or maybe the 1.0 series. I would be slighty hesitent to run 1.2 in
4M and 2.0 in 8M (2.0 really bloated up).

> 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).
>
  I've heard incredible things about the Apple ][ Disk drive. One, that it
took only 5 ICs for the hardware, and now only 256 bytes of code to read
from it? I'd really like to see both the schematics and the code. That's
just incredible.

  -spc (Also remembers writing code to drive the serial port under
        the Coco ... )
Received on Sat May 17 1997 - 11:05:13 BST