20 Nov
2012
20 Nov
'12
2:02 p.m.
On 11/18/2012 07:57 PM, Mouse wrote:
I went through my larval phase on VMS on an 11/780, and I think it had
something like 60M of _disk_
My first Linux machine had less* disk than that! :-) It was blessed with a
capacious 8MB of RAM though (I think the minimum was 2MB at the time,
although it went to 4MB not long after)
* It was an 89MB drive, but IIRC I only gave 30-something MB over to Linux
initially until it was clear that it was stable enough for me to do the
bulk of my work on.
I suppose it's so cheap these days that it makes no meaningful difference
to the cost of a device to give it 32KB or 32MB; may as well give it the
larger value and offer a more choice to the masses. There are probably
cases of certain OSes refusing to run because the host platform has _too
much_ RAM, but I'm struggling to think of any right now.
I don't like bloat either, but I suppose the question is whether VMS would
have swollen equally if it existed with the same set of features as Linux
does. In a closed-source environment and with talented developers I expect
it might be considerably better, but still require vastly more resources
than the VMS of years ago.
There's the age-old question of where "the OS" ends and "support
programs"
begins to consider too, I suppose.
cheers
Jules
Are you saying Linux is more scalable and
fault-tolerant than VMS?
[Linux] scales from tiny embedded machines (the smallest I
use daily
has IIRC 32 MB of memory and a 50 MHz PPC CPU) The art _has_
moved on from when VMS was king of scalability.
"Moved on" to the point that thinks 32M of RAM is "tiny"?