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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!news.uoknor.edu!ns1.nodak.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.clark.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!sunic!news.chalmers.se!nyheter.chalmers.se!augustss From: augustss@cs.chalmers.se (Lennart Augustsson) Subject: Re: [NetBSD] Running on a 2Meg machine.F In-Reply-To: tfb@cogsci.ed.ac.uk's message of 11 Jan 1994 15:22:44 GMT Message-ID: <AUGUSTSS.94Jan13221934@statler.cs.chalmers.se> Sender: news@news.chalmers.se Nntp-Posting-Host: statler.cs.chalmers.se Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden References: <2gpi0m$f5b@fw.novatel.ca> <1994Jan10.083325.9481@news.cs.indiana.edu> <TFB.94Jan11152244@burns.cogsci.ed.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 13 Jan 1994 21:19:38 GMT Lines: 28 In article <TFB.94Jan11152244@burns.cogsci.ed.ac.uk> tfb@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Tim Bradshaw) writes: > I too have tried this on a 2.5Mb machine (386sx 20Mhz) with 80Mb ide. > Compiling a "Hello World" program takes about a minute...after killing > off all unneeded daemons and building a tiny kernel (on another machine, > of course), I was able to get it down to 45 seconds.... running 'small' > programs like tip, rlogin wasn't that bad at all. Even vi ran OK. > What's amazing is that it works at all. Why is it amazing? I learnt Unix on a BSD4.2 machine with 2 meg of And I learnt UNIX on a PDP11/34 with 256k memory. There were often 16 people logged on. It wasn't great, but it worked. Now I can't even fit the kernel into that much memory, even if I try to strip out the functionality that wasn't there in old (PWB, V7) Unix. Later we had a VAX starting with about 750k and expanding over the years. It worked very well. I don't understand why current systems need so much memory, but I guess I don't really care either, memory costs less than the time it would take to figure out where it went wrong :-) -- -- Lennart Augustsson [This signature is intentionally left blank.]