23 Oct
2007
23 Oct
'07
6:21 p.m.
On 10/24/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
In article <f4eb766f0710231801p53c62cd0o434e9ea87338e7c4 at mail.gmail.com>,
"Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes:
Bloated? For the day, we certainly thought so, but remember, this was
the era of monolithic kernels. All the devices you wanted to use were
compiled in and loaded at boot time. When you fiddled with your
hardware, the final step was to re-do a kernel config and re-compile.
For most changes, you could get away with compiling the affected
drivers and re-linking, but that first compile on install took hours.
I ran Ultrix 1.1 on a 5MB 11/730 and an 8MB 11/750. ISTR the kernel
was between 1MB and 2MB, but that's a fuzzy memory.
Sridhar can answer for the details of his VS2000,
but in my case...
it took all of a long work day to install Ultrix, but not more than one.
I thought those unix kernels were supposed to be little itty bitty
simply pieces of software. I had no idea they were so bloated. As for the X Window System, I've compiled the
whole thing and worked
on the server itself. I know that's a huge honkin pile of stuff and
it woudln't surprise me that compiling any distribution after X11R4
from scratch would take you all day.
Perhaps Sridhar was doing that on his VS2000, but on a headless
VAX-11, we never installed the workstation packages.
I didn't get into the "modern" UNIX era until 1994 when I got that
first $800 SPARC 1 I mentioned the other day (SunOS 4 / Solaris 1.1.1,
etc.) For the first 9 years, I was dumb-terminals only, except for
the few workstations I got to play with at DECUS conventions.
-ethan