17 May
1997
17 May
'97
4:05 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Sam Ismail once stated:
On Fri, 16 May 1997, Captain Napalm wrote:
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).
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).
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 ... )