16 May
1997
16 May
'97
7:41 p.m.
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