VanLUG Email Archive
Dave Martindale (davem@zeppo.cs.ubc.ca)
Tue, 19 Jan 1999 10:53:20 -0800
Vincent Janelle <malokai@gildea.net> writes:
>The amiga rocked unix. :) Thats just pride though, I know that
>technically it sucked, although a fully multitasking OS in less than 1mb
>of ram is pretty damn amazing.
Really? I remember running UNIX on a PDP-11 with 48 Kwords (96 Kb)
of memory. It was fully multitasking, complete with daemons running
in the background for printing. With some more memory (I think 124 Kw),
it supported 12 terminals with students writing and running course
assignments.
However, there was minmal networking - a couple of synchronous modems
going to IBM and Honeywell mainframes. No Ethernet, no NFS, no TCP/IP.
And the terminals were self-contained ASCII terminals running at 9600
or (gasp) 19200 bps. No X or other window managers. The editing was
done with line-oriented editors like "ed" - no "vi" yet.
I'll bet you could still run all these core functions of UNIX or Linux
in far less than 1 Mb of ram if you stripped out all the networking
stuff and used serial terminals.
The problem is that we now expect much more of a single-user workstation
than we used to expect from a multi-user timesharing system.
Another example: I once used a Burroughs B-5500. This was a mainframe
computer, built with discrete components (pre-IC, pre-printed circuit
board). Main memory was 32 Kw of 48 bits each, or 192 Kb total.
In this ran a fully multitasking operating sytem for batch jobs,
including hardware-supported memory management and virtual memory.
Dave
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