Magazine retrospectives

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_crl.com>
Date: Sat May 17 23:47:44 1997

On Sat, 17 May 1997, Captain Napalm wrote:

> > 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).

Yeah, it was a version less than 1.00. I haven't played with Linux for a
while and didn't know that the kernal has fattened up since 1.0. I guess
I better stop bragging to people that I can run linux in less than 4
megabytes.

> > 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.

The Apple ][ was an incredible machine. One beautiful hack on top of
the next.


Sam
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Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass
Received on Sat May 17 1997 - 23:47:44 BST