7 Jun
2009
7 Jun
'09
4:09 a.m.
At 2:36 PM -0400 6/6/09, Ethan Dicks wrote:
2BSD on a PDP-11 was much more compelling in 1992 when
PDP-11s were
affordable by mortals and 32-bit UNIX ran on hardware we could never
hope to own ourselves with licenses we could never hope to afford.
Even in the early days of Linux, products like Interactive UNIX on a
386 was more "useful".
I had plenty of PDP-11 gear (over $1000 out-of-pocket in addons plus
lots of freebies) and I had problems marshalling the resources to load
2BSD. Fast-forward to when most serious computer types had a 386 or a
486 w/16MB of RAM and 80-200MB of disk (1994-1995, say), and Linux
started to look mighty attractive, if still a little rough around the
edges.
I was running Linux on my 486/33 w/8MB RAM in January of '92. I
upgraded in '93 to 20MB RAM specifically for Linux. Then when I went
back to sea at the beginning of '94 I had to downgrade to a 386SX/16
laptop with only 4MB RAM. That was painful, but I was able to use
TeX, and I could just run X-Windows well enough to use xdvi.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |