Minix vs. ELKS (was Re: Pretty good week)

From: Doug Yowza <yowza_at_yowza.com>
Date: Sat Feb 28 01:00:24 1998

On Fri, 27 Feb 1998, John Rollins wrote:

> Well, I'm definitley not a Minix junkie, I haven't even had time to get
> around to putting it on one of my 8088's, but I think the current version
> is 2.0, which I think will run on an 8086/88 if you have enough disk space
> and a way to get all that stuff onto the drive. You would probably want a
> 286 to do anything with 2.0. For some strange reason, I downloaded Minix
> 1.1 to install(probably because it will fit on a bunch of 360k disks, but
> 1.1 doesn't do much, everyone told me to use 1.5). Try checking out the
> comp.os.minix newsgroup.

A little surfing revealed that Minix is alive, but not doing so well.
I couldn't connect to ast's site, but he's got a co-author now that had a
home page up:
        http://minix1.hampshire.edu/index.html

The good news is that Minix is now free, and it's got networking support
(including a web server). The bad news is that it's gained some weight.
2.0 might barely run on a 640K PC, and even 1.5 wants 512K. Maybe I'll
wait for ELKS after all. All I want is to run a few network daemons and
a shell in 128K RAM. Is that too much to ask for?

> BTW, is yowza_at_yowza.com a real address? Sounds funny to me...

Yes, it's real, and yes, it's annoying. I'm not crazy about the trend of
archiving, HTMLizing, and web indexing mailing lists, so I hide behind
this address whenever I may say something inane (often) that I don't want
published for posterity. I decided to play this game after I searched for
my name in a search engine once and found some email I wrote in 1985!

-- Doug
Received on Sat Feb 28 1998 - 01:00:24 GMT

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