Discuss Digest, Vol 16, Issue 10

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

"Jack Coats" <jack at coats.org> wrote:
> Back when nights were bold and Linux was under 2.x for a version, I ran
> Linux with X as a web and file server on a 32M Intel 16MHz 386SX without co-
> processor. ... Sorry for the nestalga.

These young whipper-snappers, they all want a gig of RAM, a quarter-gig of
video memory, a half-terabyte of disk storage, a fiber-to-the-curb uplink; and
then they recruit millions of programmers from Finland to India to Australia
to Latin America to China to write billions of lines of Java and PHP code to
fill up all available space.

;-)

My first box ran 0.98a or something like that, had 4M RAM, a 100Mb drive, and
a 25MHz 386DX.  Though even back then I remember the first order of business
was to swap out that drive for a gigabyte drive...so I could fill up all
available space with lines of C code.

One other nostalgia tidbit:  the firmware on DEC hard drives (2Gb/4Gb circa
1994, later Quantum Fireball series) ran on a Motorola 680xx core.  I remember
seeing Dave Cutler's name all over the kernel source code; it was a nice
tightly written thing that could probably run in 16K let alone the half-meg or
whatever was available.  Cutler's name appears all over another famous kernel
out there, one he wrote after leaving DEC.  (Can you guess the name?  Hint: 
like Linux, it's endured code-bloat over the decades...;-)

-rich